Keeping track of Winnipeg’s skeeters

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 16/04/2018 (2785 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A University of Winnipeg graduate student is abuzz with interest in researching the city’s abundant mosquito population.

In fact, Martine Balcaen was so bitten with curiosity that she moved to Winnipeg from Calgary specifically to study the infamous insects. Now in her second year of a master’s program in bioscience, technology and public policy, Balcaen has joined forces with the City of Winnipeg for her thesis, which looks at where mosquitoes go after they’re fully grown.

For the first part of the project, Balcaen dealt directly with live mosquitoes during the past two summers, raising droves of them south of the city in pyramid-shaped cages.

“Basically I threw water and sod in the cages and left them open. Mosquitoes lay their eggs inside of those puddles of water, so I got a bunch of mosquito larva that way,” she said.

“When they were adults, I ended up marking them with fluorescent dust. Once they fly off covered in dust, eventually they end up back in all these traps that I have set up.”

Each day, she emptied the traps and checked the mosquitoes for the presence of fluorescent dust.

“I know if they have dust, they’re my mosquitoes — and I know exactly where they came from,” she said.

“I also know where the traps are, which means I can basically trace where they went from one day to the next or however long it took them to get to that trap. I can figure out what kind of features on the landscape are attracting them.”

Now in the next stage of the project, she is examining about 25 years’ worth of trapping data from the City of Winnipeg’s insect control branch.

“Each summer, probably every other day or every three days, they empty their traps and count all their mosquitoes,” she said.

“They decide how many are female and how many are male. That’s important because only the female ones bite.”

The problem is that no one is looking at the information as a whole, Balcaen said. Mainly, it’s used to determine when to fog without providing insight about how the mosquitoes relate to the landscape.

Determined to delve deeper, Balcaen is taking the City’s data and entering it into geographic information system software, which will allow her to make maps of the mosquitoes’ movement.

“I have a data set with landscape features and I have a data set with mosquito surveillance data,” she said. “I’m putting those both together to see how they relate and to see if there are certain features of the landscape that are statistically more important for the mosquitoes so that they are gravitating towards them.”

The City of Winnipeg is funding Balcaen’s research, so they’re invested in the results.

“I want to create a predictive map for them so that each year they can put in their mosquito data. From that, this program can predict which places on the landscape are going to be problem sites for mosquitoes so they can use less resources than they are currently to treat them,” she said.

“We’re just making their treatment plan a bit more precise so they can improve efficiency and stop spraying areas where they don’t really need to spray.”