Pacific Spirit Marine Institute
Home Foreclosures Add To Public Health Crisis. Minnows are eating up the news!
Friday, June 13, 2008
Maricopa County in Arizona has one of the highest home foreclosure rates in the U.S., which is presenting a potential West Nile crisis.
There are tens of thousands of swimming pools in the county left unattended and without maintenance. The pools, in the yards of homes now vacant, are a breeding ground for millions of mosquitoes. 17,214 homes in the county were offered at foreclosures sales in the first three months of this year alone, and there are countless numbers of homes where the owners have simply walked away.
Maricopa’s solution to the growing number of stagnant ‘pool swamps’, left behind in the aftermath of the deepening mortgage crisis, is to release minnows into these pools. Gambusia minnows can eat up to 300 mosquito larvae per day. Public health workers are breeding thousands of the little fish to make available to residents and local governments across the county.
What could possibly go wrong?
Conventional pool maintenance is out of the question. “Chlorine is not an effective answer because it is burned off by the sun in a couple of days” says Daniel Anderson a Chandler city official as he released a shoal of minnows into an abandoned backyard pool.
Anderson says, “Once these fish are in the pool, we are not concerned about mosquitoes until someone either buys the house or the pool dries up.”
What will be left in the dried up pools?
These little fishes breed at a rate of 25 to 300 offspring every two weeks. The rate at which water evaporates can be calculated, and I’m guessing that water evaporation has been estimated. Variables in temperatures, humidity and cloud cover make the evaporation calculation fairly fluid, but the parched desert climate of Maricopa county is rather consistent…so…
Minnows multiplying at a rate of maybe 600 per month, leaves me with pictures of tiny little fish dying in distress. Rotting in the noon-day sun of the desert, piled atop themselves in a heaving mass of flies and maggots while green pool water evaporates.
The horror (and the stench). The minnows sounded like the perfect idea until I started thinking 4 or 5 months down the road.
Let’s hope I’ve over thought this thing, as I’ve been known to do.
Photo: salmon society.
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Home Foreclosures Add To Public Health Crisis. Minnows are eating up the news!
