There are no more mosquitoes like there used to be. It is not a figure of speech, but a reality with which, for a few decades now, we have been dealing every summer with the spread of the ‘tiger’: more aggressive, able to bite even through clothes, passing through fabrics without problems, to ‘attack’ our skin at any time of the day or night, even in full sun, and transmit ‘new’ diseases. A real super-aggressive ‘fighter’ that moves silently and reproduces even in very small pools of water, as explained to Adnkronos Salute Diego Fontaneto, research director of the Cnr at the Water Research Institute (Cnr-Irsa), located in Verbania Pallanza. “Knowing it better, however, can help us defend ourselves,” he underlines.
In fact, most of the bites that each of us suffer from these insects are not inflicted by the ‘old’ domestic mosquito, the Culex pipiens or common mosquito. “The ones that strike are ‘alien’ specieswhich arrived starting from the 90s”. And the most present is precisely the Tiger mosquito“originally from south-eastern Asia, it arrived here from the United States. But there are also other species, increasingly more aggressive than the common mosquito, such as the Korean mosquito (Aedes koreicus), present for about ten years especially in the Po Valley, and the Japanese mosquito (Aedes japonicus), “continues Fontaneto. The mosquito that “was present until the 90s only bit in the evening, at home and in the shade. It only went on the neck and wrists, because they were the parts of free skin. The tiger and the ‘sisters’ that we have today they are more aggressive – specifies the expert – and they sting anywhere on the body they can get through, even through thicker fabrics like jeans. They can pierce the fabric with their mouthparts which are very long and thin.“.
To defendtherefore, “loose clothing that does not stick to the skin is more effective. Tight trousers – warns Fontaneto – are easily bypassed”. A strategy not to be adopted, however, in the case of other types of unwanted guests, such as “midges, sandflies and ticks, which get under clothes and do even more harm. In these cases, closed and tight clothing is better. The opposite, in practice”.
In short, “the tiger mosquito is certainly more unpleasant than those we knew in the past”. Starting from the difficulty of defending itself. “It is silent – describes Fontaneto – you don’t hear it coming because it has a different flight, the sound is not heard so well” like that typical ‘…zzzz..’ that once haunted the summer evenings of many, produced by the common mosquito. Furthermore “it is active at all hours” and its larvae “develop in very, very small pools of water. They do not need ponds, swamps, environments with lots of water where it is also easy to intervene. The tiger, like the Japanese and Korean – points out the researcher of the Cnr-Irsa – only needs a few cubic centimetres of water to develop the larvae. Saucers of plants are enough, but also a bamboo cane with holes in it”.
But there is a possibility of defense. “The good thing about the tiger mosquito – the expert points out – is that it never moves more than 200 meters from where it was born. If we could keep an area of that size very dry, without even the smallest collections of water – without saucers, without manholes – in that area the tiger mosquitoes would not arrive because they do not move that much”.
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