Slippery mosquito trenches sector the expansive salt marsh bordering our family farm in Marshfield, Massachusetts. These trenches were built to eliminate stagnant water that mosquito’s use for breeding. I've traversed these ditches hundreds of times without complaining, knowing that they reduce the mosquito population. Lately, I've become intolerant of mosquito trench jumping because scientists claim they don't work.
Mosquito trenches are long, straight, narrow, parallel ditches, four to five feet deep, spaced a hundred feet apart. If I'm walking toward a row of ditches, I will encounter a trench every hundred feet.
After high tides flood marshland, the trenches drain into salt water tributaries. An overhead view of a drained marsh shows curled natural tributaries intersected by long, dark, ruler-straight channels. The ditches don't look natural from an airplane: Nature creates curves, not straight lines.
To access the South River salt marsh, I walk past our driveway and down a well-worn path. After fighting my way through a stand of ten-foot tall reeds, I will see several thousand acres of cushy marsh grass populated with gulls, terns, ospreys and plovers. A walk on this serene carpet induces a calming reverie that is disrupted every hundred feet when I encounter another vile ditch. Seasoned trench hoppers like me stay a foot away from the grassy, false edge when launching and landing.
I've fallen in mosquito trenches several times so I know what awaits me if I misjudge my leap. A month after my sixth birthday, my aunts, uncles and cousins witnessed my muddy baptism when I ran and jumped over a mosquito trench and my show-offish leap landed a foot short. I plunged shoulder first in two feet of inky, stinky, mush. As my relatives extricated me they twirled my body deeper into the muck, eventually muddying every square inch of my body.
Many years later while looking through binoculars, I slid into a perfectly obvious mosquito trench. Since my first trench plop I had substantially increased my height and volume and this allowed me to twist my body, land upright and keep my face clean although I did smother my legs and waist with cream-cheesy mud.
Everyone agrees that mosquitoes are a public nuisance worthy of militaristic assault. Mosquito slapping remains a traditional Massachusetts summer activity. On summer evenings, just as the sun nestles in the hills and relaxation drifts in the air, residents bolt indoors when the first mosquito appears. The mosquito war is over and the mosquitoes won. While ocean breezes beg to cool our skin, the whirring victors stare at us through screens as we watch Dr. Phil reruns and sweat in stagnant humid air.
Mosquitoes have antagonized humanity for many years. When returning Civil War soldiers introduced malaria into the North, panicked wetland scientists fought to drain stagnant marsh water mosquito breeding grounds. Marsh ditching projects gained momentum in the 1930s when the Civilian Conservation Corps, a Depression era federal government initiative, hired unemployed men for this work. This program resulted in the ditching of 95% of Eastern United States saltwater marshes.
The Commonwealth of Massachusetts currently has nine mosquito control districts staffed with people who don't like mosquitoes. Plymouth County Mosquito Control Board has a million and a half dollar operating budget that funds insecticide applications and projects that eliminate mosquito breeding habitats. In 2011 they deepened and widened two miles of Plymouth County mosquito trenches with a ditching machine. The trenches that were originally two feet wide are now five feet wide, my current jumping limit.
Mosquito Control engaged in a ruthless chemical war during my youth, a time with few environmental laws. Our sedate, treed neighborhood endured a bi-weekly invasion by a military surplus truck staffed with sweaty, tee-shirted men manning huge jet guns that smothered the countryside with fog-of-war doses of the meanest insecticide available. We thought they liked children because they smiled as they aimed the fog toward us.
The mosquito war in Plymouth County heated up in the mid-1980s, soon after dreaded mosquito borne Eastern equine encephalitis killed several Plymouth County residents. Mosquito Control mobilized a swarm of World War II vintage DC-3 insect bombers that crisscrossed the Plymouth County airspace spewing insecticide. During the bombardment, mothers hid children in cellars or behind duct-taped windows, farmers without barns bid their cattle goodbye and fisherman crawled into their bilges.
The following evening, I couldn't find a mosquito anywhere. Over the next few days I looked everywhere for just one of the little guys. I felt bad because they didn't mean to hurt anyone and they only borrowed a drop of quickly-replenished blood. My mosquito hatred returned within a week when angry cousins and acquaintances of the recently deceased mosquitoes wreaked bloody revenge on my skin.
Mosquito Control currently posts an online rogues gallery of mosquito varieties proven to terrorize the locals. In no-nonsense, FBI-like prose, they describe Aedes vexans as "aggressive human biters," (I donate a gallon of blood every summer to their breeding program); Aedes cinereus as "ankle biters" (These little bastards chew on me when I nap on my chaise); Anopheles punctipennis, "an aggressive winter mosquito" (They have ruined many dog walks); Culex pipiens, a house mosquito known to transmit disease (My remedy for these pesky midnight screamers: A vacuum cleaner with a long hose) and Ochlerotatus taeniorhynchus, a "bite anytime" salt marsh mosquito (Whose very existence led to thousands of mosquito trenches.)
In the book The Life and Death of the Salt Marsh, authors John and Mildred Teal argue that mosquito trenches lower the water table and eliminate habitats for many types of rodents and birds along with small fish that feed on mosquito larvae. This book, published in 1965, changed public opinion about marshes from dumping ground to valuable natural resource.
Joseph Conlon, technical representative of the American Mosquito Control Association agrees that mosquito ditching does have its pros and cons: "It (ditching) did affect mosquito production on salt marshes in the upper east coast, however it was so extensively used, including areas that didn’t produce mosquitoes, that it also negatively impacted marsh hydrology." Mr. Conlon explained that mosquito breeding habitat elimination remains a priority and his members now use innovative land modification techniques.
I asked Tim Deschamps from the Northeast Mosquito Control Association what could be done to replace mosquito trenches. "Grid ditching" he said, "is an effective way to reduce larval mosquito populations, but can have other unintended, undesirable effects. The standard used today on many areas is called OMWN (Open Marsh Water Management), a technique that creates pools or pannes to allow predators such as fish to inhabit these areas during low tides, and channels and swales to allow high tide water to drain."
In Massachusetts, several county mosquito control projects utilize OMWN techniques. Low-compaction digging machines create shallow depressions that collect tidal water that attracts larvae-eating fish. The soil excavated from this process is used to fill nearby mosquito trenches and create improved marsh walking conditions for those without Olympic-caliber broad jumping capabilities.
After conversing with mosquito experts and researching the current state of mosquito control I concluded that the world's best minds were working together to eliminate mosquitoes from the earth. Someday we will sit by our swimming pools and reminisce about the old days when mosquitoes ruled the night. Until that day, I’ll have my neighbor Bill, a pathological mosquito hater who fires up his insect electric chair every evening. His electronic device entices hormonally active mosquitoes with a seductive, boudoir light, then fryolates them.
Or maybe the mosquitoes are winning. In my neighborhood, with chemical and electronic mosquito combat in full force, I see mosquitoes all day long, not just in summer evenings. And why are they bigger and their bite more painful?
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Seacoast Fog
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