Why Disney World doesn't have mosquitoes

Disney World has mosquitoes. Go to the store near the entrance and they&#x27;ll even give you complimentary insect repellent. They do a good job of controlling mosquitoes, but they&#x27;re not miracle workers.<p>EDIT: it looks like Snopes wrote about this: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.snopes.com&#x2F;fact-check&#x2F;disney-world-mosquitoes&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.snopes.com&#x2F;fact-check&#x2F;disney-world-mosquitoes&#x2F;</a>

&gt; No standing water means no ideal spots to lay their eggs. In the ’60s, Potter accomplished this by digging drainage ditches built into the park’s base layers, effectively draining the swamp in its entirety.<p>Seems like this is the real meat, I wish the article had gone into more detail here.

Yikes I thought this was going to be about why Walt Disney &quot;World&quot; (so TV productions) have mosquitoes and I already started imagining something along &quot;it was too annoying to draw&#x2F;animate mosquitos by hand&quot; in my mind.<p>Reading about the actual article definitively makes much more sense. I think it is important to also acknowledge the history and importance of eradicating mosquitos for the sake of public health. For example, Italy had to deal with malaria at least until Mussolini. Eventually fully eradicating malaria with a combination of draining wetlands and use of insecticides such as the toxic, child-defect-causing DDT.<p>It&#x27;s quite funny to see that they are using chickens as a canary method.

LOL. And insecticides. Lots of them. “ But Disney tries really hard. Crews spray relentlessly. Every morning, every evening.”<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.orlandosentinel.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;os-xpm-2002-09-21-0209210131-story.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.orlandosentinel.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;os-xpm-2002-09-21-02092...</a>

Lack of standing water, if anyone was wondering.

Disney wages its battles along 86 miles of canals, service roads, firebreaks, power lines, fields and fences. They use the same two pesticides widely sprayed all around Florida that are considered safe by state and federal environmental authorities. Employees spray the same routes twice a day, far exceeding the routines of other mosquito districts in Florida.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.orlandosentinel.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;os-xpm-2002-09-21-0209210131-story.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.orlandosentinel.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;os-xpm-2002-09-21-02092...</a><p>Plus chickens

&gt; Why Disney World doesn’t have mosquitos<p>TFA is actually about HOW Disney World purports to not have mosquitos.<p>WHY Disney World doesn’t want mosquitos is a different issue.<p>Disney World is some kind of fantasy expression of an ideal world. For the creators, this means an absence of irritants and an abundance of entertainment, sugar, salt, fat, and merch.<p>The difference between Disney World and the world is that one is an enclave and the other is a world.<p>The fact that mosquitos exist in both tells us something about the intelligence of species.

I&#x27;m surprised that chickens eat mosquitoes efficiently, seeing as they can&#x27;t fly much.

This blog post reads like and advertisment because it claims there&#x27;s no mosquitoes when of course there is and also no mention of pesticides, when you can be sure there is.

Half-joking: the person that will find an effective, low-cost method to repel mosquitoes will become a very rich person.<p>Nathan Myhrvold tried, but apparently failed [0].<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nymag.com&#x2F;intelligencer&#x2F;2017&#x2F;07&#x2F;laser-shooting-mosquito-death-machine-nathan-myhrvold.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nymag.com&#x2F;intelligencer&#x2F;2017&#x2F;07&#x2F;laser-shooting-mosqu...</a>

Personally I&#x27;m still waiting for the promised technology that scans the area for mosquitoes (using computer vision) and then takes them out individually with a low power laser.<p>The main benefit of this seems to be controlling mosquito populations while not bluntly eradicating all bug life (as other traps do) much of which contributes to a healthy ecosystem.

Dr William Gorgas did that for the Panama Canal Zone in 1904. Now that was a big job. 500 square miles of jungle.[1]<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.insectweek.co.uk&#x2F;news&#x2F;mosquitoes-and-panama-canal" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.insectweek.co.uk&#x2F;news&#x2F;mosquitoes-and-panama-cana...</a>

Boils down to classic “Disney magic!” — mostly poison.

Real world UX

At least when I lived there, a lot of Orlando had similar mosquito control programs in place. It wasn&#x27;t that you&#x27;d never see a mosquito, but in the relatively close in suburbs, you get much fewer mosquitos than you would otherwise expect. The cities in that area conduct municipal mosquito monitoring and spraying.

I remember growing up I’d <i>see</i> the mosquitoes. Tons of them and you could tell when they bit you or landed in your arm.<p>Nowadays though, I feel like I don’t them. They seem invisible or not even there anymore, until I get home and am trying to figure out how they got to my ankles.

They may not have mosquitos but boy do they sure have love bugs! When we went the year before covid there were so many at Hollywood studios that we skipped one of the toy story lines. They were literally everywhere.

Really cool. So much we can do with landscaping and building design than just look pretty and it&#x27;s always a treat to learn sometimes we actually do cool things like this in those areas.

It should read Disney World has a good mosquito control system. That does not mean it has no mosquitos but they limit the mosquitos by various means.

anything new here from the mostly 2018 mentalfloss article it is based on? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20368845" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20368845</a>

TL;DR<p>- All water is kept running<p>- Sloped buildings and structures drain water<p>- Carbon dioxide traps (and save the victims for analysis)<p>- Repellent plants<p>- Chickens at the park (which way mosquitoes)

9 advertising placements in a single article.<p>Even with adblock, reading flow of the text is utterly disrupted.

TL;DR – drainage ditches, carbon dioxide traps, roofs that don’t collect rainwater and chickens that eat mosquitoes.

How is this hacker news material? The article is poorly written too. It&#x27;s just paraphrasing a Sun article at best.

I wonder if the author have been to Disney World. Ever. Getting mosquito bites when you are high or drunk, count too right? One thing is , I went to Orlando once, and don&#x27;t remember anything(including mosquito bites), and another is &quot;Why a huge attraction park , in the middle of a swamp, in Florida, doesn&#x27;t have any mosquitoes&quot;. What a joke.