Battling our deadliest predator

MOSES LAKE — Mosquitos are more than flying, buzzing and biting annoyances.

They are, in the words of Colorado Mesa University history professor Timothy Winegard, humanity’s deadliest predator, responsible for many billions of deaths throughout the long history of human existence as they hunt for human blood and transmit bacteria, viruses and parasites in every bite.

Now humanity is fighting back using the best technology we have at our disposal, local mosquito district officials say.

As manager of Grant County Mosquito Control District 1, Ann Belchik-Moser is one of the generals in that fight, leading a small army of technicians, sprayers and even a few pilots to limit and prevent the spread of mosquitoes over roughly a fifth of the county centered on Moses Lake and containing the lake, O’Sullivan Reservoir and a lot of land irrigated by the East Columbia Basin Irrigation District and the Quincy Columbia Basin Irrigation.

“Our main responsibility is this 540 square miles,” Belchik-Moser said. “It’s a pretty big area. Mosquitos love standing water, and we have lots of standing water in this district.”

Belchik-Moser said the district is not just the largest of the three in Grant County — District 2 covers the northern tip of the county, while District 3 centers on Coulee City — it’s also one of the largest districts in the Pacific Northwest. Based at the Moses Lake Municipal Airport, the district has a 2022 budget of $3.3 million funded by an assessment on all property owners within the district, and is set to spend $1.7 million devoted to insecticides, $1.2 million on general operations, and $165,000 to maintaining and operating the district’s two spraying aircraft.

In Washington, Belchik-Moser said the two main mosquito pests are Culex tarsalis — commonly known as the Western encephalitis mosquito — and Culex pipiens — less lethally known as the common house mosquito. Both species can transmit West Nile virus, St. Louis encephalitis and western equine encephalitis, she said.

Belchik-Moser said the district has an extensive surveillance program to figure out what kinds of mosquitoes are breeding in the area in order to determine how best to combat them.

“We set traps all throughout the district, we monitor populations and fluxes into the district from outside areas and within our district. And then we test some of those mosquitoes, the vector mosquitoes, for diseases,” she said.

Assistant Manager Carina LaFave, who oversees the district’s labs and testing program, said the traps set out so far this year have picked up about as many flies this year as mosquitoes.

“Not many mosquitoes,” she said.

“It will pick up,” Belchik-Moser added.

And when it does, the district will spray, both from the ground and from the air. GCMCD 1 has two aircraft. One of those is a twin-engine Cessna Skymaster 337 that generally flies at night spraying a special chemical designed to kill mosquito larvae as they wriggle in standing water, based out of a rented hangar out at Grant County International Airport. The district has just recently purchased four acres at GCIA as part of a $2.4 million project (funded out of carefully-held district reserves) to build its own dedicated hangar right next to the U.S. Forest Service’s air tanker base, Belchik-Moser said, but has no plans at this time to move all of its operations from the Moses Lake Municipal Airport to the Port of Moses Lake.

Belchik-Moser said the district moved its aerial operations to the GCIA because when it sends its aircraft out to spray, they are simply too heavy and the municipal airport’s runway is too short for the aircraft — especially the Cessna — to take off safely.

“The commercial zone down here is growing,” she said. “There's lots of people and lots of buildings here. So we asked, are we doing things as safely and as appropriately as we should be?”

For the time being, Belchik-Moser said, the district remains committed to keeping its administrative offices and laboratories at the municipal airport. But she said the district has had numerous requests from outside its boundaries to expand its operations — such as to help battle mosquitoes in wetlands near Wilson Creek — and if its responsibilities expand, it may need to consider moving into a bigger facility.

“Can we expand our borders, given our facility? And the answer is no, we cannot,” she said. “So we would need to have a bigger facility, more room, more offices, more room for equipment, at some point down the line, in order for us to expand.”

Charles H. Featherstone can be reached at cfeatherstone@columbiabaisnherald.com.