Why Calgary wants your mosquitoes – dead or alive!

The city and the University of Calgary need help tracking mosquitoes in parks this summer, as part of a study about the bugs and diseases they carry.

They don’t care if you kill it first, but city officials are asking Calgarians to send them their mosquitoes this summer.

The City of Calgary is teaming up with the University of Calgary on a citizen science project examining mosquito ecology and the potential health implications of the invasive northern house mosquito, also known as culex pipiens.

The process is simple: just head to the Inglewood Bird Sanctuary or Ralph Klein Park to grab a mosquito kit – which comes with a collection tube and label – and use it to collect mosquitoes encountered in the park during your visit, whether alive or dead and squished.

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You then fill out the label with the date, time and location, and drop off the sample in boxes within the parks.

“What we’ll do, is then identify what the mosquito is, and that’ll help us know where mosquitoes are throughout the city that are harassing people, and what species of mosquito they are,” said John Soghigian, an assistant professor of veterinary medicine at the University of Calgary.

“Of course, we also are still putting out traps all over the city and working with The City of Calgary to monitor mosquitoes, but sometimes it’s hard to get at mosquitoes when they are actively seeking a host, so this helps us do that.”

Alex Coker, an integrated pest management technician with the City of Calgary, says citizens will start to see more mosquito activity now that the temperatures have climbed.

Calgary has 35 to 40 different mosquito species. All of them tend to lay their eggs near or in water.

“A lot of the mosquitoes we have here are floodwater mosquitoes, they use bodies of water that dry up multiple times through the year, so things like ditches are areas we tend to focus on when it comes to monitoring the larvae,” Coker said.

She cautioned that they also breed in rain barrels and bird baths, something for homeowners to keep in mind.

The City of Calgary uses a bacterial product to fight local mosquito populations.

It’s dispensed by spraying it into bodies of water.

“Basically, the way it works is that the mosquitoes will ingest it … and it gets activated once they eat it, and basically it creates pores in the lining of their gut, and that’s what kills them.”

If there is a lot of standing water throughout the city, officials can use an aerial program, which allows them to use a helicopter to apply the bacterial product to a large area over a short area of time.

If you’ve ever wondered why city officials can’t just attempt to eradicate all the mosquitoes, it’s because they actually are vital to the ecosystem.

Only female mosquitoes feed on blood; males rely solely on nectar as a food source, while females use both.

Because both males and female feed on nectar, they do act as pollinators and also serve as a food source for a lot of species including birds and dragonflies, and also aquatic organisms like fish.

Coker says mosquito numbers in Calgary typically peak in July.