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Too many adult mosquitoes (a summer time thought for January, temp down to 9 f last night)


KittenFishMom
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This summer, when I had a lot of sunfish and bluegills in my native tank, I started feeding mosquito larva. Youtube was full of people saying that fish thrived on them, and how to set up wonderful water to get loads of free healthy fish food. I even bought a bigger mosquito net so I could catch even more. The wild fish went, well, went wild for them !

One small problem was that the fish did not get every last larva. In no time my garage had more adult mosquitoes per square foot than any place else on earth.  Anyone who walked into the garage was swarmed. I stopped feed the larva, but it didn't help.  I left the door open at night, with the lights off. I left the door open durring the day. I bought a mosquito zapping light. I put on repellent everytime I went in the garage.  I still got eaten alive.

I don't like pestisides, and I really did not want to spray any with my fish tank there.

I could find nothing on youtube about how to handle a fish room full of very hungry mosquitoes. There was nothing in the garage for them to eat, but me ! Over time, they did die off, but it took much longer than I wanted it to.

Anyone have any tricks on how to avoid adult mosquitoes, if you are feeding live wiggling larva to your fish?

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On 1/8/2022 at 2:50 PM, KittenFishMom said:

This summer, when I had a lot of sunfish and bluegills in my native tank, I started feeding mosquito larva. Youtube was full of people saying that fish thrived on them, and how to set up wonderful water to get loads of free healthy fish food. I even bought a bigger mosquito net so I could catch even more. The wild fish went, well, went wild for them !

One small problem was that the fish did not get every last larva. In no time my garage had more adult mosquitoes per square foot than any place else on earth.  Anyone who walked into the garage was swarmed. I stopped feed the larva, but it didn't help.  I left the door open at night, with the lights off. I left the door open durring the day. I bought a mosquito zapping light. I put on repellent everytime I went in the garage.  I still got eaten alive.

I don't like pestisides, and I really did not want to spray any with my fish tank there.

I could find nothing on youtube about how to handle a fish room full of very hungry mosquitoes. There was nothing in the garage for them to eat, but me ! Over time, they did die off, but it took much longer than I wanted it to.

Anyone have any tricks on how to avoid adult mosquitoes, if you are feeding live wiggling larva to your fish?

You just described why I put 2 powerful airstones in a 10 gallon tank. 

I also went back to the pond and garden supply store, and bought more azolla looking for the azolla that clumped together. I brought home a dozen damselfly larvae to add to tanks with mosquito larvae (I actually did not catch mosquito larvae on purpose, we have zika and other disease vector mosquitoes here. The mosquitoes came in the house via a torn screen because desert doesn't have much water... open top fish tanks were heaven for the skeeters), plus I added more airstones and surface agitation. 

I know that I lost a few of the slower fry, and it was a price well paid. We now have damselflies living around our plants, and they are third generation hatching in the tanks. Losing a few snails and slower fry is a small price to pay for no mosquitoes in my bedroom 😬

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Thanks so much for your reply.

The tank in my garage is a 120 tank full of native fish, plants, snails, crayfish, and at times, mudpuppies. Some of fish are big enough to be eaten by people others are much smaller, but usually too big to be eaten by the big fish. 

When I found damselfly larva, I always put them in the tank, but every one was eaten shortly (3-10 seconds) after being added to the tank. How do you keep the fish from eating the damselfly larva? Maybe I could build a floating open topped mesh cage for them to hang out in? maybe a breeding box would work. I will research that. 

I add fresh seaweed from the lake most days for the fish to hunt in, to supplement the worms and adult brine shrimp and other live food. They go through it carefully and completely.

I had a canister filter and 4 sponge filters and 2 HOB filters going. I tried growing duckweed from the lake, but there was too much agitation with all the filters.  The mudpuppies and bullhead catfish were very messy fish. and feeding a handfuls of earthworms put a lot of fine mud from inside the worms into the water. They would also eat any small fish or small crayfish. 

How does the clumping azolla work on the mosquitoes? 

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well, I don't know about adults, but Mosquitofish (Gambusia affinis) are fantastic at eating the larvae. They're so good, they have been used as Malaria controls in several countries. One small town in Europe even built a statue of a Mosquitofish because the fish killed all of the mosquitos in the area after a year.

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On 1/9/2022 at 11:32 AM, KittenFishMom said:

When I found damselfly larva, I always put them in the tank, but every one was eaten shortly (3-10 seconds) after being added to the tank. How do you keep the fish from eating the damselfly larva? 

Incredibly dense, floating mats of plants. It's what the damselfly larvae were hidden in at the pond supply store.

Azolla, duckweed, wolffia, and foxtail or milfoil floating at the surface offer hiding places. I added the plants with the damselfly larvae already hidden in the plants.

If I put the larvae in without allowing them to hide in plants *before* I put them in the tank, they don't last 2 minutes. Even endler boys will hunt them and eat them if they are in the open.

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I was gathering the mosquito larva from buckets with water and leave and dumping into the 120 tank for the fish to feed on. the mosquitoes were not laying eggs in the tank that I know of. I was the cause of my problem. My fish loved eating the mosquito larva. They would probably love eating the mosquito fish too.

This spring, I might try separating bloodworm from mosquito larva, and raise the bloodworms under a net in a tub.

My guess is this works on a small scale. If you are putting them in a small tank, one at a time and making sure they get eaten before the next one goes in. 

I was dumping in a lot of larva day after day, and the fish would go crazy eating them. but there must have been someplace in the tank for the larva to hide from the fish and mature. Once the adults started showing up, I stopped adding the larva to the tank. It took weeks for all the adults to mature and leave the tank and die out, after I stopped loading the tank with the larva. 

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As a side note: These were native wild fish and they had no interest in anything that did not wiggle. It was spring, and there were not many worms around. YouTube had video after video about how to get a ton of free wiggling larva to feed fish to keep them happy and healthy.

Funny, there were no videos that mentioned the free hungry adults that would result.

I should have known better.

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Well... I'm not sure I can offer much advice, but I can at least assure you you're not alone in your experience. Unfortunately mine happened in my house.

I'd set up my summer tubs too early and had to bring them inside before a bout of cold weather. Six juvenile platys in each 25 gallon tub. Not many plants at all, but the sides of the tub were black.

And then... for a few weeks we would wake up to about fifty of these:

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Our method of control was the hose of our vacuum.

Honestly, it sounds like you had it much worse! And a vacuum isn't going to help you in a garage.

Here are some ideas you could try:

  • Cover the majority of the tank, and right above the only opening, place the mosquito zapping light. Maybe if you set up this way from the beginning, you'll get the majority of the adults. They don't fly well when they're first hatched.
  • Harvest larvae more often. If you're harvesting every three days instead of every seven days, for example, you'll be collecting younger larvae, so your fish will have more time to find them before they grow up.
  • Eliminate larvae hiding spots, especially near the surface of the water. You could even put white tape or paper around the top of your tank so the larvae really stand out to the fish.
  • At least try feeding them frozen larvae. I'm guessing it won't work, but if it does, that would be awesome.
  • Build a bat house in your garage. (Just kidding this is a terrible idea. 😄 )

Good luck!

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On 1/11/2022 at 9:54 AM, KittenFishMom said:

batts would be wonderful, but they are almost all gone here due the illness that was killing them. We put up a bat house on the outside of the garage.

White nose disease is zapping bat populations across the entire continent. They found evidence of the fungus in Carlsbad caverns in 2020, and in the Copper Canyon caves of Mexico last summer. 

Vermont had a slight increase last year in bat population, so hopefully the rest of the colonies impacted by the fungus will begin to recover. It's a combination of global warming and human use of pesticides that are contributing to the lethality of white nose disease 😔

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On 1/11/2022 at 10:13 AM, KittenFishMom said:

I heard it was researcher studying bats in china that brought COVID out of the bat caves. 

 

 

Covid genetic markers show intermediary hosts that still have not been identified. That means another animal between the bat coronavirus and people, possibly more than one. 

The original SARS-1 from 2 decades ago (and the reason we had access to vaccines so quickly) was bat to cerval, I believe, and then to humans.

MERS intermediary host was camels.

China has been blamed like Spain was blamed for the 1918 flu pandemic: because those were the countries with doctors who raised the alarm.

Wastewater samples from Spain showed the coronavirus responsible for covid had already been present in March of 2019, over 6 months before the case in Wuhan.

We would have known about the wastewater evidence of a coronavirus much earlier, if the CDC had not been defunded and the pandemic prevention team that had been testing global samples of wastewater since the ebola outbreak had not been eliminated. 

 

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On 1/11/2022 at 10:29 AM, KittenFishMom said:

Wow, that is interesting.  I thought there must have been signs before Wuhan. I have gotten so depressed by COVID, that I have not kept up on it lately.

My stepmom headed one of the water testing subcontractors, and her entire department was eliminated in 2017.

Our family had been laying bets on how long it would take before we missed the opportunity to prevent a pandemic. Her department tested water samples during the ebola outbreak, and found cities where travelers brought ebola back to the states before hospitals informed the CDC they had patients. 

Most USians are not aware of what an important role the CDC used to play in keeping us safe. Hopefully it will get back on track under this administration. 

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