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The buzz at Jersey Shore: SilenceA solution for biting flies is being noticed.
By Jacqueline L. Urgo
Inquirer Staff Writer
HOLGATE, N.J. - Long Beach Township Commissioner Robert A. Palmer remembers the Fourth of July weekend four years ago, when it seemed there were more biting greenhead flies than tourists.
"People were calling up crying from getting bit. Businesses were losing money. It was crazy - all because of the greenheads," Palmer said. "That's when we knew we had to do something fast."
Every western breeze sent a ravenous air force of Tabanus nigrovittatus from the salt marshes to the humans vacationing on this narrow patch of sand near Long Beach Island's southern tip. Anybody here that awful summer of 2002 has a greenhead story.
Palmer remembers talk of forming a greenhead support group.
The tipping point, he said, came when residents stopped complaining and started demanding something be done.
But what?
The answer came in a box. Holgate's efforts have been so successful, people are noticing. Since biting greenheads are a problem elsewhere in the region, lawmakers in Trenton are considering legislation that would provide $250,000 to build anti-greenhead boxes in Ocean, Atlantic, Cape May and Cumberland Counties.
Intrepid female greenheads, bent on fulfilling a mission to reproduce, don't respond to conventional pesticides. And experts say the common method of eradicating coastal mosquito populations - cutting canals through the salt-marsh shallows where they breed - may expand greenhead breeding areas.
"Finally, someone came up to me who had been up in Cape Cod and saw these boxes and suggested we try them," Palmer said. "We really had nothing to lose, people were so fed up."
Even four summers later - when there is nary a buzzing greenhead even on a breezy day at what is the start of peak greenhead season on Long Beach Island - people remember.
Heather Reynolds, 14, down for the summer from Glen Ridge, Essex County, laughed when she recalled how everybody would get covered in clothing from head to toe before going outside.
"It was totally ridiculous," she said.
Mary Marchionne, a former teacher from Fort Washington who rents a house in Holgate every summer, shook her head in disbelief when she talked about having to cancel a doctor's appointment because so many greenheads had covered her black Saab that she refused to risk a fly bite while getting into it.
"I took one look at the car and said forget about it," Marchionne said. "I think they thought I was crazy when I gave them the reason I was canceling the appointment."
Some people canceled their vacation reservations at motels or rental homes.
Desk clerks at the Jolly Roger Motel remember the summer with such disdain they won't even entertain a conversation about it.
"It got to the point where you just couldn't go outside," said Maria Kelly, who has owned a duplex in Holgate for 14 years and rents out the half not occupied by her family. "You just stayed in. My grandchildren refused to come for the Fourth of July that year. My renters canceled left and right. It was horrible."
Greenheads - and mosquitoes - have long been among the most pervasive pests from the salt marshes of southeastern New England down the East Coast to the Mississippi River.
Before scientists developed methods to deal with the bloodsuckers, coastal areas were veritable wastelands where few people were willing to spend time, said Wayne J. Crans, associate research professor of entomology at Rutgers University.
Over the years, research and development of pesticides and eradication practices have helped turn a biting New Jersey wasteland into some of the most expensive real estate on earth, Crans said.
But the number of biting insects like greenheads and mosquitoes found in populated areas very close to marshlands - areas such as Holgate in Ocean County, the back bays of Atlantic County near Brigantine, and along the rivers that meander into rural Cumberland County - is still an issue.
Prime greenhead breeding season in New Jersey - usually early June to mid-September, with the peak in July - coincides with prime Shore vacation season.
Biologists say female greenheads are blood-seeking creatures, craving the protein in human or animal blood to help them lay their eggs.
Male greenheads, by contrast, feed on flower nectar.
So taking the cue from other areas along the East Coast with notorious greenhead populations - namely Cape Cod - Palmer, who is also the director of public works for the 51/2-square-mile township, came up with a plan to build dozens of plywood boxes to trap and kill the female greenheads that attack their prey with a ferocious scissor-like mouth that tears the skin and leaves large, itchy welts.
At a cost of about $50 each, the township built the boxes that proved the bunkerbusters of the war on greenheads. They're a simple, tablelike design, with a screen on the top and an angled bottom that lures the greenheads inside and traps and kills them there.
Rutgers University biologists have noted that traps like this have collected as many as 1,000 greenheads per hour.
Palmer said the town's early boxes were replicas of the Cape Cod design - even copying the sapphire-blue color that attracts female greenheads in New England.
But apparently the Jersey greenheads have a style all their own, preferring a sleeker design and a stylish matte-black color.
So Holgate's newer boxes, Palmer said, reflect the local greenheads' taste.
Township workers, who place as many as 120 of the boxes throughout Holgate each summer, have been instructed to add a dose of octenol, a chemical that attracts biting insects, for good measure, according to Palmer.
"We really don't have problems with them anywhere else on the island - just here because it's such a narrow stretch that when you get a west wind, it blows them out of the marshes where they breed and onto whoever is on the beach or walking around outside," said Bob Muroff, who owns a small trailer park nearby. "A few years back, it was like something out of a horror movie here. People were leaving and swearing to never come back to Long Beach Island."
Muroff said people were "thrilled" when the saw the dead bugs in the boxes.
The boxes seem to be doing the job - except for one weak link in the chain: the state Department of Environmental Protection still refuses to allow Long Beach Township workers to place the boxes inside the Edwin B. Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge, which is adjacent to the town. The DEP says the boxes could disturb nesting populations of the threatened piping plover.
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Contact staff writer Jacqueline L. Urgo at 609-823-9629 or jurgo@phillynews.com. |
