Thursday, April 19, 2007
Ah, the mozzies people are here again, peeking around our used underwear and crawling over compost (read: decomposed crap) with little pipettes in hand, trying to collect mozzie larvae. Kinda reminds me of little kids fishing in canals. The man today was nice, in contrast to a previous visit by an ultimate snob. He was pretty concerned today after seeing my giant water trays, but deflated significantly after I demonstrated the 4-times-daily water changing mechanism (and the lack of larvae for his lunch). So we ended up chatting a bit about my plants instead (why is it that people make a fuss out of them??) and I had to entertain the strangest questions like whether Nepenthes catch a lot of mozzies etc.
Honestly, is this the way to go about it? They're pretty much picking up behind the mozzies, instead of DEALING with them. As I have ranted about before, after I made known the local practice of larvae-catching and fine-slapping to a large group of foreign CPers, it was followed by a commotion about invasion of private property and lack of common sense and etc etc. Go take a walk in any govt-owned area. Public drains, parks (fallen leaves esp. in secondary forest areas), the backyard of their own offices - perhaps I shall start a Fine-The-Govt drive! Lmao.
IMO, transfer these guys to meaningful jobs, and use that money instead for real R&D. If we are to spend the dough on stuff like genetics and stem cell research, what better issue to tackle first, than what is truly a preventable menace? Here are some suggestions, although I doubt that even if these were to be read, they would hardly penetrate the impossibly-thick skulls of our dear friends sitting in the office Up There.
1. GM mosquitoes with recessive fatal genes. It's unheard of, but come on. What are those millions for then?
2. Biological mozzie poisons. Much like how quinine deals with malaria, there must be something out there that's harmless to humans, but the moment they lap up our poisoned blood, BAM!
3. Mozzie-specific viral infections.
4. Biological mozzie control. Breed and release stuff like dragonflies? That no one does it, doesn't mean it can't be done - they just didn't have a need to. There are commercially-available lacewings, nematodes and ladybugs, and trust me, if the States had an issue with mozzies as we do, I'm willing to bet my bottle of Cointreau that dragonflies would also be on that list.
5. Better yet - install one of those new CO2-emitting mozzie traps as a way of showing us how our tax money is being used. These cover a huge area, so a few machines in every estate should do the job nicely.
On a different note, I'm so touched by this family friend. He helped me get my new chiller up and working over the last 2 days, adamantly refused any payment and just called me up to make sure it's working ok and that I didn't get zapped to death.
Wenky
4:08 PM
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