141–150 of 320 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No one is going to rant about how their HOA is pretty OK. My building has an HOA, and the worst I can say about is that's it's pretty boring.
There's a vast difference between the HOA for a building, and one for a suburban neighborhood.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree in the sense that if everyone did their part, the outcome would be meaningful. This is not to say that traps don’t make your house more livable. Once, I lived in a house connected to a forest in Brazil—no real neighbors, and a shitload of mosquitoes. I did buy some fancy traps with UV lights and fans, and oh boy, I killed a shitload of them. Not to say I fully solved the mosquito problem, but I significantly…
The UV light traps attract all sorts of insects that aren't female mosquitos looking for a blood meal. They can catch mosquitos too, but probably not super well. A trap focusing on the scents they follow from humans would do more with less collateral damage.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Very cool where can I get on?
I have seen a similar thing at https://us.biogents.com/ Haven't used it so I can't comment on its effectiveness
We have pantry moths in the house (came in from the bird food)...is there anything similar for them? We use pheremone traps, but that's pretty late in the lifecycle and not 100%
There are many forms that require even less investment. I made some out of some plastic water bottles and a few pairs of old socks, for example.
There are also lethal ovitraps, which kills the mosquito, but I havent experimented with those.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Property taxes basically never pay for privately owned things, be that landscaping in common spaces, maintenance of private neighborhood roads, etc.
The alternative is public space and public roads.
People are grudgingly willing to pay to put in a brand new sewer once. No one wants to fund maintenance or pay millions to replace it in 60 years and cities are literally going bankrupt because the population density isn't enough to maintain the infrastructure.
Cities realized this decades ago which is why many are reluctant to add more unsustainable public roads/sewers/etc. and insist new development owns and funds them privately....which tends to require a HOA to fund maintenance from communal contributions/reserves.
https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2024/01/benjamin-h...
How quickly would the local population of mosquitos adapt to the MosquitoDunks, such that within a few generations, the only surviving ones would be the ones that are unaffected by the dunks? Or is that not a real concern?
I wonder… I don’t know much biology, but is there a general principle where things that have a shorter reproductive cycle tend to “win” these sorts of arms races? I wonder if we will have to occasionally go out and find better copies of the bacteria, haha.
When that happens, natural selection almost always fails to develop a resistance because a resistant organism needs to have a defense against every mechanism of action at the same time. The probability of two beneficial mutations lining up perfectly to create that resistant organism are just extremely unlikely. That’s the basis for modern oncology, which uses combination therapy to prevent tumors from growing resistant to any one drug.
Edit: yep I was right. Against mosquito larvae, Bt produces multiple Cry toxins that bind to specific protein receptors in the microvilli of midgut epithelial cells and Cyt toxins that directly interact with membrane lipids [1]. It’s a triple whammy because there’s six major toxins (Cry4Aa, Cry4Ba, Cry11Aa, Cyt1Aa, Cry10Aa, and Cyt2Ba), Cyt1Aa creates more binding sites for the Cry toxins to attack the cell, and Cyt1Aa itself has two mechanisms of action, one of which disassembles the cell membrane, leading to cell death. That is an incredibly difficult evolutionary hole for an organism to dig itself out of.
I wish there were an equivalent for ticks.
Every time I have read science guys about things that you can do to kill mosquitos there is an analogy to putting a drain in the ocean. You can kill mosquitos at a fantastic rate but, unless you are also killing them in all your neighbor's yards for a mile around, they are just going to keep coming as fast as they die.
I wish there were an equivalent for ticks.