Mosquito Watch An interactive map showing current mosquito counts in Winnipeg
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Winnipeg Nuisance Mosquito Trap Counts
The graphic below shows the number of adult female nuisance mosquitoes last observed in each of the city’s traps. In the summer this count is usually updated daily.
Trap locations and descriptions are approximate; the city doesn't release exact locations of traps to avoid tampering and vandalism.
If looking at this graphic makes you itchy — or if you want to also monitor adulticiding factor analysis, quadrant averages, or other city skeeter stats — visit the city’s own trap-count site.
Click on any circle for a graph of recent trap counts for that location.
About mosquito counting
Every spring, the City of Winnipeg’s Insect Control Branch fires up a nuisance-mosquito control program that begins with applying larvicides bodies of standing water, monitoring the development of mosquito larvae and counting the bloodsuckers that show up in city traps.
Nuisance mosquito species are those that are not known to transmit diseases to people. They include Ochlerotatus dorsalis and Ochlerotatus fitchii, which usually mature in the spring, and Aedes vexans, a nasty biter that matures closer to the summer.
The Insect Control Branch monitors 28 traps inside the city and another nine on the fringes of the city. Thanks to a council-approved policy created to prevent politicians from monkeying around with mosquito control, the city can not spray for adult mosquitoes until the “adulticiding factor analysis” is rated as high — essentially, we have a lot of nuisance mosquitos, and conditions are favourable to breed even more of them.
It’s widely accepted mosquito fogging is cosmetic: It only reduces the number of adults on a temporary basis. Preventative measures such as larviciding and eliminating bodies of standing water are considered way more effective. More than anything, precipitation, temperature and soil moisture — basically, the weather — determines whether we wind up with a lot of mosquitoes in any given summer.
Nuisance-mosquito monitoring is entirely separate from a provincial program that monitors the numbers of Culex tarsalis, a species that begins biting people later in the summer and is known to convey West Nile virus to humans. The province — not the city — determines whether the city will fog for West Nile-carrying mosquitoes.
History
Updated on Wednesday, May 22, 2024 10:20 AM CDT: Updated for 2024 season.
