"paghat" wrote in message
news

2: introduce mosquito fish to ponds

This is useless advice for most garden water features & birdbaths which
are too small to sustain fish.
[snip]

I suppose my reply was biased by the fact I spent a lot of time this summer
with my friend in his family's rice fields, in Sacramento area. Get caught
in the fields near sunset and you're an instant buffet.

This year because of concerns with west nile, the vector control district
would add mosquito fish to the flooded fields, spray something, which I
assumed was Bacillus thuringiensis along with having some fogger trucks
spray insecticide every few nights. The fogger trucks reminded me of the DDT
spraying trucks from the 50s.

His back yard is basically a rice field, they have two mosquito magnets, one
on either side of the patio, and it keeps the mosquito levels to a tolerable
level, otherwise you couldn't grill or eat outside. I suppose that just
tossing a block of dry ice on either end of the patio would also work, by
flooding the area with CO2 and preventing the mosquitoes from locating a
food source. His mosquito magnet, uses a combination of propane generated
CO2 and Octenol as an attractant.

In my own experience, I keep mosquito fish and koi in a 1200 gal pond, along
with b.t and sweep out the standing water from the drainage ditch. That
helps keep the mosquito level down. Dragonfly and damsel flies seem to
survive just fine with the presence of b.t. and predatory fish. I often find
dragonfly larva in the main pond area hiding among the plants, and in the
fishless filters.

-S