Mosquito Patrol’s Swarm Tactics

You need a SWAT team member like Howard Mariota on your side--especially when heavy rains breed more bad guys than usual.

Mariota hunts mosquitoes.

He and eight other bug patrol inspectors--employees of the Greater Los Angeles County Vector Control District--search daily for standing water that provides a perfect breeding ground for the pest with the needling whine and blood-sucking proboscis.

They roam 1,300 square miles of the central and eastern parts of the Los Angeles Basin and San Fernando Valley, the largest of five mosquito abatement districts in the county.

The inspectors say they are trying not merely to eliminate a nuisance but, more important, reduce the chances of blood-borne diseases such as St. Louis encephalitis being spread throughout the county.

“I take it personal,” said Mariota, 39, heading back to headquarters in Santa Fe Springs after a sweaty morning of spraying away larvae. “Especially if someone gets sick in my area.”

Mariota has several abatement measures at his disposal. In fast-drying seasonal ponds and storm drains, he sprays an oil solution, which spreads thinly across the water’s surface and flows down the mosquitoes’ snorkel-like breathing tubes and drowns them. In other cases, he merely kicks the leaves out of a clogged gutter or dumps the rainwater from a backyard bucket or old tire.

But in deep pools, he brings out his weapon of choice: Gambusia affinis. The guppy-like fish voraciously dines on the baby bloodsuckers.

On a recent morning, Mariota had to check the progress his fish were making in an acre-size rain pond near downtown. Near Little Tokyo, he climbed over a partly fallen chain-link fence and trudged through the tall green weeds of an abandoned construction site.

He nodded to a homeless man and came around a hill to an unlikely urban wildlife reserve on 2nd and Alameda streets, the type of overgrown lot a mosquito inspector knows well. A duck skittered across the pond’s surface and butterflies wafted in the breeze as he dipped a long-handled cup in the water.

He slowly drained and scanned the water, finding no larvae. The 40 fish he left in the pond two weeks before were busily eating away.

“A rain pond like this, I’d rather treat naturally than chemically,” Mariota said. But he decided to spray a shallower pond with the “Golden Bear” oil solution, which spreads in an iridescent sheen and evaporates in several days.

Then he was off to check other trouble spots in his sprawling territory, which extends from the swampy flats of Harbor City to the Los Angeles River near Griffith Park.

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Last year, he and other inspectors sprayed 1,208 miles of gutter water and 634 unchlorinated swimming pools and fish ponds, said Gene Mayon, operational supervisor of the Santa Fe Springs office.

They conduct aerial surveillance looking for algae-filled pools, which are the telltale signs of mosquito breeding ponds. They check rivers, roadside ditches and one of the worst culprits, clogged storm drains. They routinely pop open manhole lids on city streets to spray.

The agency is also preparing for the arrival of a more fearsome insect--killer bees, which have already penetrated California’s borders. Three trucks are labeled Africanized Honey Bee Suppression Unit, and inspectors are attending seminars on how to deal with them. Mariota said the bees have been seen in Palm Springs and the Imperial Valley.

To monitor encephalitis, the inspectors test chickens, which carry the virus and pass it on to humans via mosquitoes. In several coops stationed around the county, the birds wait to get bitten by mosquitoes, then lanced for blood samples by county workers.

Every morning, Mariota is up and driving at 7 a.m. He responds to new complaints about mosquito infestations, but also has his regular haunts to check.

“I’ve been spraying this ditch since I started working here,” the 13-year veteran said, bending over a drying trash-filled sump in Pico Rivera one morning this week. “I’ll be spraying it until I retire.”

Aside from his powder-blue work shirt with the vector control patch, Mariota might not look like the typical county inspector. A dark mass of tattoos, which covers his entire torso, peeks out from his collar and sleeves. His hair is long and two earrings hang from his ear.

“People at the tattoo shop, they say, ‘What do you do for a living?’ I say, ‘Oh, I’m an inspector with the county.’ ”

Mariota said that because of the agency’s low profile, residents sometimes do not believe that he is an inspector when he needs to check their backyards in response to a neighbor’s complaint. But because he isn’t there to levy fines, they usually let him on their property, he said.

“People are happy to see me,” he said. “They’re all smiles. One neighbor told us that a pest control outfit was going to charge them $200 for a spraying.”

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Mildred Holmgren, 86, of Atwater Village felt that way when Mariota came to inspect the swamp in her backyard.

She has lived there since 1925, when the home sat near the banks of the still-meandering Los Angeles River. Her back porch used to be perched over a small creek under arroyo willows.

Then in the late 1930s, the river was channeled, and her creek became a sealed-off ditch under a new street, she said. Every year, rainwater flows down from her driveway and fills the ditch and, this week, it was a teeming bayou of mosquito larvae.

“Do the ducks eat mosquitoes?” she asked Mariota. (No, he told her.) Soon the inspector was pushing through the tangled brush, spraying the pond. As the oil spread, the water began rippling with drowning mosquito larvae.

“They’re hating life,” said Mariota, with a proud nod. “Party’s over.”