ABQ, BernCo to start test spray aimed at reducing Egyptian mosquitos

Edward Garcia was watering the front yard at his Adobe Acres home on Monday when he issued a warning about mosquitoes: “If they’re out, they’re going to get you.”

The metro area is in the heart of mosquito season, which started in the spring and ends in the fall.

About 10 miles northeast of Adobe Acres is the Bel Air neighborhood, where resident Don Trujillo said he has tried to prevent mosquitos from coming onto his property — including removing any standing water — “but that doesn’t seem to be working.”

Adobe Acres and Bel Air are two of three neighborhoods — the Snow Park area near Indian School NE and Moon NE is the other — selected by the city of Albuquerque and Bernalillo County that will be used as testing grounds for a new mosquito spray to kill off the Aedes aegypti or Egyptian mosquito.

“(They) are the tiny, little black and white mosquitos that I think have impacted just about every neighborhood in the metro area,” Urban Biology Division Manager Nick Pederson said. “All day long they’ll be biting people behind the arms, behind the legs. So, they’re, you know, a nuisance in the neighborhoods.”

Starting in July, the city and county will apply six treatments in the three neighborhoods using a liquid form of bacterial insecticide, the same product people can find in mosquito dunks that contain larvicide, Pederson said.

The city, which uses fogger sprays for adult mosquitos, is seeing an increase in mosquito resistance, he said. That is why it is looking at liquid larvicide, which “could be an additional treatment option,” Pederson said.

“Anything will help,” Trujillo said.

The city will spray the three neighborhoods late in the evenings using a pickup carrying a turbine that will blast a “mist” of the larvicide into the air before it settles into areas that could get water “so we could treat prior to rainfall events,” Pederson said. There are about 300-350 homes that will be part of the trial, he said.

Some homeowners have agreed to the experiment, while others did not. This week, the city and county will visit with other owners and explain what they’re doing then “they can contact us directly if they have any follow-up questions or concerns, and we can work with them,” Pederson said.

“This is a good way for us to target larvae breeding in neighborhoods where sometimes people aren’t even aware that this habitat is in their yard,” he said. “We’re talking about very small pools of water, cups or possibly trash, plastic tarps, wheelbarrows, buckets. Anything that can hold water for, you know, up to a week is essentially (a) mosquito breeding habitat.”

The insecticide will not kill adult mosquitos, however, only those in larvae form, Pederson said.

People should turn anything that collects water upside down. A bucket of water, for example, “can impact people in the 150-200-yard radius,” he said.

The city will do the six treatments then trap the mosquitos and see how “this relates between treated and untreated (areas),” Pederson said.

“We just want to see how well it works before we can roll it out, hopefully, at a larger scale,” he said.

If anyone has mosquito-related questions or concerns, city Environmental Health Department spokesperson Jeremy Dyer said, people can call 311.