KAILUA-KONA — Big Island residents armed with a cellphone camera and a $1 magnifying glass are becoming science sleuths, contributing to research that would have been handled by a drove of scientists a decade ago.
Thanks to a crowdsourcing initiative launched in May 2015 to map the distribution of “yellow fever” mosquitoes on the island, scientists and health officials will have more information to go on when they are deciding how to combat mosquito-borne diseases like dengue and Zika — scourges which will appear sooner or later.
Some two dozen residents are stalking the shady byways, ready to photograph and document mosquito presence at the nearest buzz, and more are being recruited for the effort. The project will equip residents with knowledge about the mosquitoes in their area, keep mosquito abatement in the spotlight and help to focus efforts on eliminating breeding sites.
It’s the type of community involvement that health and emergency officials say is necessary to effectively combat the mosquito-borne diseases that are predicted to define the years ahead.
“We need to keep a handle on this,” said Durrell Kapan, the researcher who launched the project.
As 100 million people come down with dengue every year around the globe and thousands are being sickened by Zika, the public’s help in creating a fine-scale distribution map here on-island “allows us to focus on this one species that is most likely to be the (vector).”
“We’re also trying to give people information that will reduce the level of fear,” Kapan, a research professor with the University of Hawaii at Manoa and the Department of Entomology and Center for Comparative Genomics at the California Academy of Sciences, added.
Whenever Kawaihae resident Don Kephart is out and about — whether on the trails at Pololu Valley or Volcano — he’s snapping photos of the mosquitoes he’s encountering and uploading the images along with date and place to the web portal iNaturalist, a leading social network for natural history.
Like volunteer Lynn Beittel, he’s keenly interested in making sure as much information on mosquitoes is available as widely as possible after the island’s bout with dengue fever that sickened 264 people from September 2015 to March 2016.
“It would be almost impossible to do a comprehensive survey under today’s budgets,” Kephart said. “I think with crowdsource and folks like us, science gets more bang for the buck.”
The research — even Waimea Middle School students have gotten involved — has already yielded some tantalizing results. Among them, the discovery of a remote pocket of aegypti in Keawewai Gulch near Kohala Estates north of Kawaihae. The belief among scientists was that this human flesh-loving species always stays close to its prey, lurking in damp places near homes and public areas.
Convention holds that aegypti — the leading vector for dengue transmission — don’t venture more than a few hundred feet from where they were born. But this particular stretch of mosquito-infested water is more than twice that distance from a single home which is rarely occupied.
So where are they getting food and why are they there?
“It’s a big question,” Kapan said. “Is there a variation in biology? Are they adapting in the time they’ve been on the island?”
Volunteers are also finding a curious absence of aegypti mosquito in Puna and Hilo. The mosquito is concentrated between the Kona International Airport and South Point, Kapan said, but there are exceptions.
Hawaii has six species of mosquito, the first introduced in 1826 by a ship carelessly draining water casks full of larvae over the side. Sizable eradication campaigns pushed the yellow fever mosquito off the other Hawaiian Islands in the 1940s and ‘50s, but aegypti linger on the Big Island.
Aedes albopictus, or Asian tiger mosquito, ranges across the islands but is considered less likely to transmit human mosquito-borne illnesses because of its varied diet. However, it is still a potential carrier, and scientists want to understand the distribution of this species, aegytpi and the southern house mosquito, the last being responsible for the decimation of native birds through the spread of avian malaria.
To join the citizen science project, residents will need to install the iNaturalist app on their smartphone, set up an account at iNaturalist and read the introductory material. Then they can begin snapping photos and entering information.
A $15 device that clips onto a phone can be used for macro photography of the insects. A cheap magnifying glass will suffice, Beittel said.
“After the dengue outbreak and the ongoing Zika scare, I became very interested in mosquitoes and their ability to spread disease,” Beittel said. “There wasn’t much current information about mosquito populations on the island so when I heard that average folks were catching, photographing and posting mosquitoes on iNaturalist, I thought this is important research and I can do that.”
While his research has been going on for some months, the crowdsourcing aspect is in its incubation phase, Kapan said. When enough people are trained to become their own science sleuths, the project can really expand.
“We’re trying to get as many people on board as possible,” Kapan said.
Info: http://www.inaturalist.org/projects/mosquitoes-in-hawaii