This story is basically Appeared on Inside Climate News and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
It can spread deadly diseases. It’s hard to find and hard to kill. And it’s obsessed with human blood.
Aedes aegypti is a species of mosquito that people like Tim Moore, district manager of a mosquito control district on Colorado’s Western Slope, really don’t want to see.
“Boy, they’re locked into humans,” Moore said. “That’s their blood meal.”
This species of mosquito is native to tropical and subtropical climates, but as climate change raises temperatures and distorts rainfall patterns, Aedes aegypti – which can spread Zika, dengue, chikungunya and other potentially deadly viruses – is on the move.
It is growing rapidly throughout the Mountain West, where conditions have historically been too harsh for it to survive. Over the past decade, towns in New Mexico and Utah have begun catching Aedes aegypti in their traps year after year, and this summer, one was found for the first time in Idaho.
Now, an old residential neighborhood in Grand Junction, Colorado, has emerged as one of the latest frontiers for this troublesome mosquito.
The city, with a population of about 70,000, is the largest in Colorado west of the Continental Divide. In 2019, the local mosquito control district observed a disoriented Aedes aegypti in a trap. It was strange, but mosquitoes had already been found in Moab, Utah, about 100 miles to the southwest. District Manager Moore estimated that he had captured a hitchhiker and that Colorado’s harsh climate would quickly exterminate the species.
“I concluded that it was a one-off, and we don’t need to worry too much about it,” Moore said.
Tim Moore, district manager of the Grand River Mosquito Control District, explains that the district needs to increase spending on new mosquito nets and staff to manage a new invasive species of mosquitoes in Grand Junction.Photograph: Isabella Escobedo