SARASOTA COUNTY (WSNN) – Chickens, mosquitoes, and fish all interconnect at the Sarasota County Mosquito Management program.
The program uses chickens to alert officials of any mosquito-borne diseases in the bird population.
If a mosquito bites a chicken, it’ll develop antibodies and not get sick. The staff checks them once a week. If they do have antibodies, they report it to the state, remove the chicken from the sentinel program, and replace it with a fresh one.
Then there’s the Mosquito fish program. The county uses these fish to eat the mosquito larvae to keep the mosquito population down.
The program has a lot of safeguards in place to protect the community and the environment from pesticides.
“At mosquito management, we don’t like to use pesticides,” Sarasota County Mosquito Management Outreach Specialist Louis Hagney said. “But, when we do use them, we’re very careful, we’re very regulated, we switch out the larvae we use because we don’t want the mosquitoes to develop resistance. We switch out the adulticides we use for the same reason.”
They produce more than 100,000 mosquito fish a year. Hagney believes their methods are among the safest in the country for mosquito control.
If you’re interested in filling an empty pool or pond with the fish control method, you can learn more here.
