This story originally appeared Inside climate news and is part of it Climate office cooperation.
It can transmit life-threatening diseases. He’s demanding to find and demanding to kill. And he’s obsessed with human blood.
Aedes aegypti is a species of mosquito that people like Tim Moore, manager of the Mosquito Control District on Colorado’s Western Slope, really don’t want to see.
“Boy, they’re locked in people,” Moore said. “It’s their blood meal.”
This species of mosquito is native to tropical and subtropical climates, but as climate change raises temperatures and disrupts rainfall patterns, Aedes aegypti, which can transmit Zika, dengue, chikungunya and other potentially deadly viruses, is beginning to move around.
It appears throughout the Mountain West, where conditions have historically been far too harsh for it to survive. In the last decade of the city in New Mexico AND Utah they started catching Aedes aegypti in their traps year after year, and just this summer one was found on first time in Idaho.
Now an senior residential neighborhood in Grand Junction, Colorado, has become one of the newest frontiers for this troublesome mosquito.
The city of about 70,000 people is the largest city in Colorado west of the Continental Divide. In 2019, the local mosquito control district spotted a recalcitrant Aedes aegypti in a trap. It was strange, but mosquitoes had already been found in Moab, Utah, about 100 miles southwest. Moore, the district manager, concluded that they had picked up a hitchhiker and that Colorado’s harsh climate would quickly eliminate the species.
“I figured it was a one-time thing and we didn’t need to worry too much about it,” Moore said.
Tim Moore, manager of the Grand River Mosquito Control District, explains that managing a modern invasive mosquito species in Grand Junction required the district to raise spending on modern mosquito traps and staff.Photo: Isabella Escobedo