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Four months after the groundbreaking for its new facility, Sarasota County Mosquito Management recently hosted its annual media day to showcase the operations that will be moving.
Those operations — and the investment, personnel and knowhow behind it — are a significant part of what local officials, starting at the top with Sarasota County Administrator Jonathan Lewis, say make the county a national leader in mosquito control.
The county "really has invested in the future of mosquito management,” Lewis said during the Sarasota Chamber of Commerce’s April 16 State of the County update. “We are one of the leaders in the country, not just in the state of Florida, when it comes to how we deal with it."
Among the tools the department uses to combat mosquito-borne illness are lab testing, chickens and mosquitofish.
"We're entering into peak mosquito season," Wade Brennan, services manager of mosquito management services for Sarasota County, said during an April 30 media tour of the facility on Pinkney Avenue off Clark Road. The peak is May through November, Brennan says.
Each week, the mosquito management team tests mosquitoes and chickens for live viruses to be aware of what could be infecting the human population.
One county official says Sarasota County Mosquito Management is helping the entire nation with its testing capabilities. “The test for the West Nile virus was actually created in our lab," Lewis said at the Chamber event.
"The CDC actually uses that or a variation of that,” Lewis added, noting Sarasota County is among five labs with the ability to conduct testing.
Sarasota County broke ground on a new $12.8 million mosquito management facility off Laurel Road and Honore Avenue in Nokomis in January. The facility is is scheduled to open in 2025.
The new facility will include a live bog for filtering water, increased pesticide storage capacities and greater room for aquaculture as well as laboratories, among other components.
In the new space, the public will also be able to view PCR testing, which the county is currently conducting in a tucked-away lab room at its Pinkney Avenue facility.
“Having in-house [testing], you get same-day results, versus if you sent it to the state lab, it would take weeks, and we don’t want to wait that long,” Brennan says in an interview.
The county tests mosquitoes from 31 sites for things like West Nile virus as well as encephalitis.
“Last year was actually a very low year for encephalitis activity, but we did have an active year for malaria,” Brennan says, adding Sarasota County saw seven cases of malaria in 2023. “It’s very important we’re doing surveillance on a regular basis because every week can be different.”
In addition to testing mosquitoes themselves, Sarasota County tests chickens for mosquito-borne illness at 12 coops around the county. The chickens are placed in a variety of areas, from private land to county-owned properties to areas with day care centers and elder-care facilities, where populations may be more at risk of getting seriously ill, says Carly Dufficy, community outreach specialist for Sarasota County Mosquito Management. The county has 70 to 75 chickens for its surveillance program, she says. Their blood is tested weekly to see if they have any mosquito-borne illnesses.
Sarasota County's approach to disease surveillance is different from most other districts in the state, which usually just treat an area where a positive chicken or mosquito was found, according to Brennan.
"With Sarasota County, we'll treat that immediate area and then we're going to do triangulation disease surveillance, setting up three different areas around that site to see if it is contained," Brennan says.
Being thorough has paid off.
“In 2018 we had 18 [West Nile virus] positive mosquito pools in Venice” and not a single case of a person contracting the illness, Brennan says.
Sarasota County’s mosquito management program extends beyond testing and spraying.
“If you just spray, mosquitoes will develop resistance over time,” Brennan says. So the researchers take a multi-pronged approach. They treat larvae in the water, and they even breed fish to eat mosquitoes.
"We have the state’s largest aquaculture for Gambusia holbrooki. They’re known as mosquito fish," Brennan says.“That is one of our best bio controls. They’re very hearty little fish that love to prey on mosquitoes.”
The fish, native to Florida, are mass produced in tanks at the mosquito control facility. Then they are put in wood lots, ponds and other areas, where the fish eat mosquito larvae. People can request mosquito fish from the facility to put in their local bodies of water, too.
The county produces about 100,000 mosquitofish a year.
Sarasota County has the second largest aquaculture program for mosquito fish in the nation, behind one location in California, Brennan says.
In its new facility, Sarasota County will be able to expand its aquaculture further to breed even more fish with the addition of three more tanks.
"Another thing that's new on the horizon is we're hoping to be able to have drone application of [pesticides to] wood lots or other areas that are very densely vegetated where our staff have a hard time getting into," Brennan says during the April 30 media event. "This will greatly improve our effectiveness."
At the moment, Sarasota County is in the "analytical stage," Brennan says, looking into the different capabilities of drone technology.
Mosquito management services also has its own fabrication shop where it makes equipment for mosquito testing and control. For example, it created the sprayers that are affixed onto its spray trucks.
Sarasota County Mosquito Management has been recognized by the state for its larval surveillance and mosquito traps, according to Brennan, who says the area has come a long way in its approach to managing the insects.
In the early 1800s, “we were named the Mosquito State – that was one of the main factors [preventing] people from wanting to come down here,” Brennan says.
“We’re killing mosquitoes every single day of the year,” Brennan says. “If we didn’t have mosquito management, it would be an area where you would not have your tourists, you wouldn’t have your businesses, and no one would want to live here.”
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