Summer, all the dangers from the tiger mosquito. “Much more annoying”, the expert warns –

There are no more mosquitoes like there used to be. It’s not a figure of speech, but a reality that, for a few decades now, we have been dealing with every summer with the spread of the ‘tiger’: more aggressive, able to bite even through clothes, passing through fabrics without problems, to ‘attack’ our skin at any time of the day or night, even in full sun, and transmit ‘new’ diseases. A real super-aggressive ‘fighter’ that moves silently and reproduces even in very small pools of water, as Diego Fontaneto, research director of the CNR at the Water Research Institute (CNR-IRSA), Verbania Pallanza headquarters, explains to Adnkronos. “Knowing it better, however, can help us defend ourselves,” he underlines. In fact, most of the bites that each of us suffer from these insects are not inflicted by the ‘old’ domestic mosquito, the Culex pipiens or common mosquito. “The attackers are ‘alien’ species, which arrived starting in the 1990s.” And the most present is precisely the tiger mosquito, “originally from south-eastern Asia, which arrived here from the United States. But there are also other species, increasingly more aggressive than the common mosquito, such as the Korean mosquito (Aedes koreicus), which has been present for regarding ten years especially in the Po Valley, and the Japanese mosquito (Aedes japonicus), continues Fontaneto.

The mosquito that “was around until the 90s only bit in the evening, at home and in the shade. It only went to the neck and wrists, because those were the parts of free skin. The tiger and its ‘sisters’ that we have today are more aggressive – the expert specifies – and bite anywhere on the body where they can get through, even with thicker fabrics like jeans. They can get through the fabric with their mouthparts which are very long and thin”. To defend yourself, therefore, “loose clothing, which does not stick to the skin, is more effective. Tight trousers – warns Fontaneto – are easily gotten through”. A strategy not to be adopted, however, in the case of other types of unwanted guests, such as “midges, sandflies and ticks, which get under clothes and do even more harm. In these cases, closed and tight clothing is better. The opposite, in practice”.

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In short, “the tiger mosquito is certainly more unpleasant than those we knew in the past”. Starting from the difficulty of defending itself. “It is silent – describes Fontaneto – you don’t hear it coming because it has a different flight, the sound is not heard so well” like that typical ‘…zzzz..’ that once haunted the summer evenings of many, produced by the common mosquito. Furthermore “it is active at all hours” and its larvae “develop in very, very small pools of water. They do not need ponds, swamps, environments with lots of water where it is also easy to intervene. The tiger, like the Japanese and Korean – points out the researcher of the Cnr-Irsa – only needs a few cubic centimetres of water to develop the larvae. Saucers of plants are enough, but also a bamboo cane with holes in it”. But there is a possibility of defence. “The positive thing regarding the tiger mosquito – points out the expert – is that it never moves more than 200 metres from where it was born. If we might keep an area of ​​that size very dry, without even the smallest pools of water – without saucers, without manholes – tiger mosquitoes would not arrive in that area because they do not move that much.”