{"id":136327,"date":"2025-11-15T12:14:08","date_gmt":"2025-11-15T12:14:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/136327\/"},"modified":"2025-11-15T12:14:08","modified_gmt":"2025-11-15T12:14:08","slug":"an-invasive-disease-carrying-mosquito-has-spread-to-the-rocky-mountains","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/136327\/","title":{"rendered":"An Invasive Disease-Carrying Mosquito Has Spread to the Rocky Mountains"},"content":{"rendered":"

This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News<\/a> and is part of the Climate Desk<\/a> collaboration.<\/p>\n

It can carry life-threatening diseases. It\u2019s difficult to find and hard to kill. And it\u2019s obsessed with human blood.<\/p>\n

The Aedes aegypti is a species of mosquito that people like Tim Moore, district manager of a mosquito control district on the Western Slope of Colorado, really don\u2019t want to see.<\/p>\n

\u201cBoy, they are locked into humans,\u201d Moore said. \u201cThat\u2019s their blood meal.\u201d<\/p>\n

This mosquito species is native to tropical and subtropical climates, but as climate change pushes up temperatures and warps precipitation patterns, the Aedes aegypti\u2014which can spread Zika, dengue, chikungunya and other potentially deadly viruses\u2014is on the move.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s popping up all over the Mountain West, where conditions have historically been far too harsh for it to survive. In the last decade, towns in New Mexico<\/a> and Utah<\/a> have begun catching Aedes aegypti in their traps year after year, and just this summer, one was found for the first time in Idaho<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Now, an old residential neighborhood in Grand Junction, Colorado, has emerged as one of the latest frontiers for this troublesome mosquito.<\/p>\n

The city, with a population of about 70,000, is the largest in Colorado west of the Continental Divide. In 2019, the local mosquito control district spotted one wayward Aedes aegypti in a trap. It was odd, but the mosquitoes had already been found in Moab, Utah, about 100 miles to the southwest. Moore, the district manager, figured they\u2019d caught a hitchhiker and that the harsh Colorado climate would quickly eliminate the species.<\/p>\n

\u201cI concluded it was a one-off, and we don\u2019t have to worry too much about this,\u201d Moore said.<\/p>\n

\"Tim<\/p>\n

Tim Moore, district manager of Grand River Mosquito Control District, explains that managing a new invasive species of mosquito in Grand Junction has required the district to increase spending on new mosquito traps and staff.Photograph: Isabella Escobedo<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. It can…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":136328,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[390,49495,4701,6423,273,134,2054,93170,111,139,69,147],"class_list":{"0":"post-136327","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-health","8":"tag-climate-change","9":"tag-climate-desk","10":"tag-diseases","11":"tag-ecology","12":"tag-environment","13":"tag-health","14":"tag-infectious-disease","15":"tag-mosquitos","16":"tag-new-zealand","17":"tag-newzealand","18":"tag-nz","19":"tag-science"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136327","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=136327"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136327\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/136328"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=136327"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=136327"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=136327"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}