It was one "skeeter" bite too many for Austin lawyer Blair Dancy. Dancy's two young boys had walked in from backyard play covered in mosquito welts from the garden and patio areas. The sight of his bump-covered, itching boys was the last straw and the mother of invention.
"I remember having relatively bad mosquitoes in Houston growing up, but never anything like this problem," says Dancy, a 38-year-old University of Texas and law school alumnus.
A natural problem solver, he invented a new trap designed to stop the skin-penetrating tyrants before they take their maiden voyages.
Dancy used a vast network of contacts and Austin resources to develop and manufacture the Mosquito Swallow. His wife, Allison Dancy, an artist and senior marketing manager for Vignette Corp., also pooled her network of contacts to bring the new invention to market. The innovative, environmentally friendly contraption is designed to trap difficult-to-catch container breeders before they become adults.
Dancy said neighbors seemed comfortable blaming nearby Shoal Creek for the multitudes of mosquitoes. After clearing intrusive, non-indigenous bamboo in his backyard, Dancy discovered something that amazed him.
"I got down to the creek, there were no mosquitoes. None. That's when I started to think: If they are not originating down in the creek, where we all thought they were coming from, then where are they breeding in such abundance?"
Climbing up the creek's banks to the house, Dancy re-entered the thick, haze of vicious mosquitoes. Pondering what attracted droves of cantankerous mosquitoes to his home, the commercial litigation attorney with Van Osselaer, Cronin & Buchanan LLP started his research.
Thumbing through countless books at the library, Dancy was introduced to the Asian tiger mosquito. He learned that there were more than 2,500 mosquito species, more than 160 of which are in the United States. The research he found was primarily done because of the mosquitoes' role in the transmission of diseases: malaria, yellow fever, West Nile virus, dengue fever and encephalitis.
Dancy noted that the Asian tiger mosquito is more aggressive than the indigenous Texas mosquitoes. He learned that the Asian tigers were believed to have been stowaways in water-filled tires that were shipped into the Port of Houston in the mid-1980s. And since then, they have been found east of the Rockies.
Dancy figured out that these mosquitoes with bad attitudes were the same variety as the ones in his backyard.
"I didn't have a positive identification in my own yard, so I got a book with detailed sketches, my boys' magnifying glass from their little science set and I caught a mosquito."
"One of the key traits is a single white racing stripe down the middle right between the head and the back section," Dancy explains.
Dancy and his wife did not wish to "nuke" their scenic backyard with pesticides, extinguishing the fireflies, butterflies and beneficial, unintrusive insects. He also didn't want to use greenhouse-gas traps that are sold in home improvement stores, which his neighbors had found unhelpful with the mosquito problem. He wanted another option.
"The thing that struck me about the Asian tTiger was where it bred," Dancy says. "There are mosquitoes that breed in creeks, rice fields, swamps and all sorts of different places. This one particular kind needs small containers that are usually dark with stagnant water and debris in them."
Dancy studied other mosquito-control inventions, but he wanted to find a simpler approach.
"I was thinking, you know, they are really over-engineering this thing," he says.
Most mainstream solutions on the market only address adult mosquitoes, he says. So, he focused on reducing the number of eggs, larvae and pupae.
Dancy learned that there was no single solution to the mosquito problem, even with chemicals.
The Sardinian Project was a massive effort funded by post-World War II relief money and administered by the Rockefeller Foundation to rid malaria-carrying mosquitoes from the island of Sardinia. In the 1930s, more than 70,000 Sardinians suffered from malaria. Tons of the insecticide DDT were dropped on Sardinia in an effort to wipe out the mosquito population on the island. While the Sardinia Project successfully ended the island's battle against malaria, mosquitoes still persisted.
Concentrating on the breeding sites, Dancy found a way to reproduce the optimum environment for mosquitoes to lay eggs. He located countless products, bins, corn cob holders, hoses and funnels from home organizing stores, resulting in humorous observations by his wife and kids. He studied the behavior of the mosquito larvae using clear containers that he set on his kitchen counter for months.
"I'd watch and study them while we all ate breakfast. I'd bang on the side, see how they swam and I'd test how they reacted to light."
Dancy sketched some concepts for his new trap based on his concept of preventing mosquito larvae from maturing. After a few years and many trips back to the drawing board to fine-tune his invention, he drafted a final prototype and had the new trap manufactured in Austin.
Dancy's trap is designed to be an ideal breeding spot for the Asian tiger and other container- or tree-hole-breeders. When the eggs hatch, the larvae and pupae will not escape. The trap itself is small, unobtrusive and easy to manage.
The trap requires a little water each week and the addition of a few dead leaves occasionally, and homeowners must be cognizant of other breeding areas around the home. Dancy's trap has a patent pending and sells for $34.95 online at MosquitoSwallow.com. It will be released in some Austin-area garden centers in the coming months. The Web site also offers helpful information for homeowners to minimize the mosquito swarms this summer.
"You have to take steps to get rid of breeding sites around your home. That's when this trap will make a difference. It's a part of a holistic approach, not a silver bullet," Dancy says.
In Dancy's product testing, one trap caught 100 mosquitoes and larvae in one week.There's no formula for how many traps are needed for each home, because mosquitoes look for areas where air flow is stagnant, and the number of high-concentration areas vary from one yard to the next.
"Where you notice the mosquitoes most is where you'll need to place a trap," Dancy says.
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