I love the idea and goals, but just reading the headline, I immediately leaped to one thought. Reading the article, they eventually addressed it.
In week two, we were somewhat surprised to find aquatic life – water fleas and mosquito larvae darting about under the surface.
If we don’t go to great lengths every season limit every opportunity for mosquitoes to breed, our backyard is miserably unusable for half of the year.
My amateur-ecologist thoughts:
I had the same reaction reading this; all my life I’ve been told to remove all standing water no matter what. It’s really unfortunate that we drain swamps, remove pools and puddles, and populate ponds with introduced fish species just to reduce mosquito numbers, because we’re destroying critical habitat and watering holes for so many species in the process. Unlike most wanton environmental destruction it’s at least for a good reason (from a anthropocentric point of view anyway), but it would be better to try and reduce mosquito populations in less invasive ways.
I posted in another thread for this article that (in my experience) salamander larvae will annihilate any and all mosquito populations before they can get established. They’re voracious little critters, to the point of frequently turning to cannibalism, because they’re racing the clock to grow and metamorphosize before their pool dries up in summer or freezes in autumn (depending on climate). Mosquito larvae are sitting ducks to salamander larvae, and given a healthy salamander population are unlikely to make it to adulthood before getting devoured.
In many areas salamander populations (as well as other amphibians) are struggling because the fish introduced to their breeding ponds (for recreational fishing, mosquito control, or just aesthetics) will often eat their larval forms. It seems like a potential win-win to use salamander population support as a means of mosquito suppression.