Ed Yong in the Atlantic: “The U.S. is sitting on one of the largest data sets on any animal group, but most of it is inaccessible and restricted to local agencies….For decades, agencies around the United States have been collecting data on mosquitoes. Biologists set traps, dissect captured insects, and identify which species they belong to. They’ve done this for millions of mosquitoes, creating an unprecedented trove of information—easily one of the biggest long-term attempts to monitor any group of animals, if not the very biggest.
Currently, these agencies can use their data to check if their attempts to curtail mosquito populations are working. Are they doing enough to remove stagnant water, for example? Do they need to spray pesticides? But if they shared their findings, Martinez and Rund say that scientists could do much more. They could better understand the ecology of these insects, predict the spread of mosquito-borne diseases like dengue fever or Zika, coordinate control efforts across states and counties, and quickly spot the arrival of new invasive species.
That’s why Martinez and Rund are now calling for the creation of a national database of mosquito records that anyone can access. “There’s a huge amount of taxpayer investment and human effort that goes into setting traps, checking them weekly, dissecting all those mosquitoes under a microscope, and tabulating the data,” says Martinez. “It would be a big bang for our buck to collate all that data and make it available.”
The same applies to cases of mosquito-borne diseases like dengue and Zika, but not to populations of the insects themselves. So, during last year’s Zika epidemic, when Martinez wanted to study the Aedes aegypti mosquito that spreads the disease, she had a tough time. “I was really surprised that I couldn’t find data on Aedes aegypti numbers,” she says. Her colleagues explained that scientists use climate variables like temperature and humidity to predict where mosquitoes are going to be abundant. That seemed ludicrous to her, especially since organizations collect information on the actual insects. It’s just that no one ever gathers those figures together….
A few mosquito-related databases do exist, but none are quite right. ArboNET, which is managed by the CDC and state health departments, mainly stores data about mosquito-borne diseases, and whatever information it has on the insects themselves isn’t precise enough in either time or space to be useful for modeling. MosquitoNET, which was developed by the CDC, does track mosquitoes, but “it’s a completely closed system, and hardly anyone has access to it,” says Rund. The Smithsonian Institution’s VectorMap is better in that it’s accessible, “but it lacks any real-time data from the continental United States,” says Rund. “When I checked a few months ago, it had just one record of Aedes aegypti since 2013.”…
Some scientists who work on mosquito control apparently disagree, and negative reviews have stopped Martinez and Rund from publishing their ideas in prominent academic journals. (For now, they’ve uploaded a paper describing their vision to the preprint repository bioRxiv.) “Some control boards say: What if people want to sue us because we’re showing that they have mosquito vectors near their homes, or if their house prices go down?” says Martinez. “And one mosquito-control scientist told me that no one should be able to work with mosquito data unless they’ve gone out and trapped mosquitoes themselves.”…