An ecologist says the flood gels will be “very annoying” over the next two weeks.
Countless flood victims are currently floating in the country as beneficiaries of the devastating floods that hit in mid-September. Some of their mothers laid their fertilized eggs years ago “in dry land, where the smell told them there was always a flood,” Lower Austrian ecologist Bernhard Seidel explained to APA. They hatched and grew in abundance in the Danube and Margazi as mosquitoes.
According to Gelson, the small blood-sucking mosquitoes are mostly “Aedes vexans” mosquitoes. Their bodies are about six millimeters large and, like their legs, have light and dark stripes. It can therefore be confused with the distantly related “Asian tiger mosquito” (Aedes albopictus), which can infect people with various dangerous viruses.
“White gels are incredibly irritating and will bite anywhere, even during the day for two weeks, but they can’t spread any diseases,” Seidel said. Even if adult mosquitoes pick up a virus somewhere, they don’t pass it on to their offspring.
The Eferdinger Basin and Machland are particularly affected
After the flood, in many places the floodwaters still did not drain because a lot of Danube silt had settled and clogged the ground, he explained. Because of the cool autumn temperatures, the larvae developed into mosquitoes more slowly (in three weeks instead of one week) than in the warm spring. The Efferdinger Basin (Upper Austria), Maagland (Upper Austria and Lower Austria), Dalnerfeld and the area east of Vienna (both Lower Austria) will be particularly affected along the Danube.
Hohenau and Ankern (Lower Austria) currently have a lot of flooding events in March. They will hold their ground in the coming days and weeks. First, they need to prick and suck the blood. It contains proteins which are absolutely necessary for the ripening of gelatinous eggs.
But plague is rare
It’s not because of mosquitoes that they don’t bother us in late spring or late summer, Seidel says: “At this time of year we sit more in school or in offices and spend less time outside. Time,” he explained. So you’ll notice less of the gels and won’t encounter them as much.
The adults disappear again in about two weeks, and unlike house mosquitoes (such as “common mosquitoes” – biologically known as “Culex pipiens”), they do not overwinter. They can only do this with their eggs, which the female jellyfish lay back on dry land, where they can smell it and detect that it is a flooded area. (APA)
