From the Los Angeles Times
September 3, 2019
SAN DIEGO — Margaret Sohn’s Normal Heights home has a lovely yard — “one of the reasons why I bought this house,” she said — but she hasn’t spent much time there this summer.
“It’s terrible,” Sohn said of the tiny mosquitoes infesting her property. “It’s just miserable.”
For better or — ouch! — worse, this is the new normal. Several years ago, three nonnative mosquito species moved into San Diego County, bringing a whole new twist on this warm-weather nuisance. Compared to your garden variety mosquito, these pests are smaller, quieter and — at least potentially — a greater menace to public health.
Why could they be more dangerous? The most common of the trio, Aedes aegypti, is popularly known as the yellow fever mosquito. Although the invasive mosquito is capable of spreading tropical diseases such as yellow fever, dengue and Zika, Chris Conlan, the county’s supervising vector ecologist, stressed that the region has seen no cases of these dread ailments.