Aquaponics & Mosquitoes - Lesson Learnt

credit to http://www.friendlyaquaponics.com/

from the post : Welcome to “The End of Malaria”

Are you irritated by mosquitoes in your neighborhood? Do you live in a location where malaria, elephantiasis, filariasis, dengue fever, or any of the other dangerous diseases carried by mosquitoes exist? Are you a health-care professional whose concern is these diseases and their control and eradication? If the answers to these questions interest you, please read on:

An additional benefit of farming aquaponically (that we noticed after our first system was operational for six months) was that the mosquitoes on our seven-acre farm had COMPLETELY disappeared! We live in Hawaii, where there are as many mosquitoes as any other tropical area in the world. Although we are fortunate not to have malaria, elephantiasis, filariasis, or any of the other dangerous diseases that are transmitted to humans by mosquitoes, we DO have dengue fever, which can be fatal in the young, elderly, or those with compromised immune systems.

Before we built our first aquaponics system, our farm was like any other place on the green windward coast of the Big Island: even during a drought, when the soil was dusty and dry and there was no standing water visible anywhere, there were still clouds of mosquitoes at dawn and dusk. If we left a door or window open in the house during the day, even for a few minutes, we knew that we would be tormented by the buzzing of hungry mosquitoes all night long as we tried to sleep. When we built our first aquaponics system, we knew we were creating additional habitat for mosquitoes to lay their eggs, so we introduced a few mosquito fish (gambusia affinis), and neon tetras into our system water.

They thrived and spread throughout the systems we built, and soon had become a self-sustaining population numbering in the tens of thousands. Six months later we noticed there were simply no mosquitoes around any longer. It’s easier to notice the presence of a pest than the absence of one, so we’re not certain when the number went to zero, but it was sometime during that six-month period. That was three years ago Since then, we’ve had the pleasure to live on a beautiful farm in the tropics that has NO mosquitoes! How does this work?

We live in the center of a deadly efficient mosquito trap: every female mosquito in the neighborhood can sense the roughly 50,000 gallons of water in our aquaponics systems, and comes to them to lay her eggs. Each egg hatches into a larva, which is then promptly consumed by one of the hundreds of thousands of mosquito fish in our water BEFORE it can ever develop sufficiently to hatch into an adult mosquito. That mosquito’s bequest of future generations is GONE, down the gullets of little fish who thrive on these meals and produce even MORE little fish hungry for mosquito larvae.

We don’t know what the effective radius of our mosquito eradicator is, but we’ve gone to the corners of our seven-acre property and haven’t found any mosquitoes there; we think there’s a good chance it is significantly reducing mosquito populations on the farms around us. We need help and funding to continue research into this phenomenon in order to understand it better, and to develop it to the point where it can easily be implemented in any location or culture.

This could make a huge difference in the lives of people worldwide who currently lose family members to malaria and other mosquito-borne diseases.