Most people in Cuyahoga County are fleeing mosquitoes, not hunting them.
But Mason Leuthaeuser is the exception.
Leuthaeuser, a registered environmental health specialist at Cuyahoga County’s Board of Health, oversees its mosquito control program, an effort that includes both killing mosquito larvae and trapping and testing the adults for diseases that can be spread to humans.
Put simply, the goal is to “STOP: MOSQUITOS NOW!” – at least, that’s what’s written on the stop sign hanging in the board of health’s equipment garage.
“If you’re working in medicine, you’re always playing catch-up,” said Leuthaeuser, who had originally planned to go to medical school. “If you work in public health, you prevent everything.”
Leuthaeuser leads a team of four summer workers, mostly college students interested in public health, to traverse the county in search of standing bodies of water that could breed the infectious bugs. In the springtime and early summer, the team treats the water with a cornmeal-like substance that kills mosquito larvae before they hatch. In the later summer, the focus is on trapping and testing mosquitoes to check whether they’re infected.
A Signal Cleveland reporter and photographer joined Leuthaeuser and other staff members in July to walk through how the Cuyahoga County Board of Health controls and surveils the mosquito population.
Step 1: Pick a location
Any type of standing water that’s present for about a week can breed mosquitoes, Leuthaeuser said.
Bradley Nature Park near the swampy Bradley Woods in Westlake is one place that the county board of health consistently surveys. The pond there holds water throughout the year, but none of it moves.
In the wetter springtime, mosquitoes also breed in pockets of water that accumulate in tree trunks or shallow ditches on the side of walking paths at the park, Leuthaeuser said. The team has already been out to the park twice earlier this spring and summer to treat the standing water.
Bodies of water don’t have to be natural to breed mosquitoes: backyard bird baths, pools and children’s toys can all be culprits, too.
Leuthaeuser said his team once received a complaint from a woman who worried the three streams in her backyard were causing a mosquito issue.
“They get out there – she had two rain barrels that were breeding thousands of mosquitoes,” Leuthaeuser said.
Step 2: Bait the traps
To survey mosquitoes for disease, Leuthaeuser and his team first have to trap them.
That involves concocting a brew of water and fresh grass clippings – a wicked mix that exudes a foul odor. The smell lures female mosquitoes looking to lay eggs, which is just who the team is trying to capture.
Team members steep the mixture in a trashcan behind an equipment garage at the at Cuyahoga County Board of Health in Parma. Then they carry it in jugs to sites like Bradley Nature Park, where they fill up squat, black bins with the grassy water.
As the mosquitoes approach the noxious water, a battery-powered fan that sits atop the bin sucks the insects into a net from which they can’t escape.
In Bradley Nature Park, the trap is placed right next to the pond. But residents can also request traps be put in their yards if they’re worried about mosquitoes, said Ashley Ruminski, a supervisor of environmental health programs.
Step 3: Check the traps
The team typically places a trap in the afternoon and comes back to collect it the next morning.
At Bradley Nature Park, the trap sucked up dozens of mosquitoes – at least 50, Leuthaeuser guessed.
That’s a decent haul, though a few ants also got in the mix.
The board of health has 101 locations such as Bradley Nature Park where it regularly traps mosquitoes – mostly in residential neighborhoods and parks. Together, the traps sweep up hundreds of mosquitoes: so far this summer, about 1,900 have been captured and identified by the Cuyahoga County Board of Health.
That’s only a sample of the thousands more mosquitoes flying around Cuyahoga County.
“When people hear the word trap, they really think it’s like a bug zapper,” said Suzanne Hrusch, the external affairs director of the Cuyahoga County Board of Health. “They don’t get that it’s for surveillance. It’s not eliminating all the mosquitoes from the yard.”
Step 4: Test the water
While the team comes out to check on the traps, they also investigate whether any mosquitoes are breeding in the area.
To do so, staff dip a white ladle in shaded, dark areas of the water. If any larvae are there, Leuthaeuser and the summer workers can usually see them with the naked eye.
“Basically they’ll just tumble around,” Leuthaeuser said. “If you see a little insect that’s doing a bunch of backflips, they’re called tumblers.”
Bradley Pond is free of any tumblers, possibly a result of the larvacide the program sprinkled in the water earlier in the summer, Leuthaeuser said. The larvacide is a natural, cornmeal-like ingredient that slowly releases a bacteria into the water. The mosquito larvae eat the bacteria, which ultimately explodes in their gut and kills them.
If mosquito larvae were present in the pond, the team would treat the water to kill them off. That also happens when responding to complaints at homes that have not yet been treated with larvacide.
Step 5: Freeze and test the mosquitoes
The final step of the process: The mosquitoes must die.
Leuthaeuser and his team carry the bug-filled nets back to the equipment garage at the board of health. The net goes into the freezer, meaning certain death for the warm weather insects.
Once the mosquitoes die, staff pick them out of the traps and put them into tubes labeled with a date and location.
Jordan Watson, a summer worker who’s in graduate school for public health, said her craziest mosquito story occurred during the rather tedious task of sorting the bugs into test tubes. She was shocked by how many mosquitoes one trap near a car dealership had picked up: six tubes worth instead of the typical two to three.
“I had to sort it, and I was sitting there for like an hour,” Watson said. “There was so many.”
The board then sends the bugs to the state’s department of health, which tests for everything from West Nile virus to various types of encephalitis.
If the county board of health learns of any positive test results, it alerts local municipalities and shares mosquito bite prevention tips.
Leuthaeuser works on several other environmental health programs – the department includes oversight of food inspections, solid waste, animal bites and more. But he said mosquito control is one of his favorites.
“In environmental health, the majority of what we do is enforcement action. Like, forcing people to follow the rules,” Leuthaeuser said. “And this is quite the opposite of that. It’s more about prevention and working with the community. I’ve never had a negative experience with anybody in this program.”
