Surfactants safely take down mosquitoes without using insecticides

Surfactants are just soap, and their mechanism of action is <i>mechanical</i>: they will physically remove a membrane, or clog a pore, or whatever.<p>This is in contrast to insecticides, whose mechanism of action is <i>toxological</i>: they can act on a bug&#x27;s nervous system.<p>One is soap, the other is toxin.<p>What this means is that soaps (surfactants) are much, much safer for the environment because they can be effectively diluted, unlike toxins which can be lethal to intersects even in minute amounts.<p>So yeah, if some of the soap gets on a bumblebee it might die, but you&#x27;re not going to get a &quot;one drop of this got in a hive and now everything is dead&quot; effect.

What&#x27;s to say that (a) the mosquitos won&#x27;t develop a resistance to the surfactants, as they do to conventional insecticides, and (b) the surfactants won&#x27;t be as damaging to the environment as other insecticides?<p>If these surfactants cause harm to other insects, it would be safe to classify them as insecticides themselves. Then you&#x27;ve just got a new type of insecticide, and need to demonstrate (a) precision, (b) recall, and (c) cost-effectiveness vs. all the other existing insecticides.

An aqueous surfactant solution will suffocate any insect to which it&#x27;s applied, not just mosquitoes. This has long been well known and there is nothing novel here, although I&#x27;m sure they&#x27;ll find <i>some</i> excuse for a patent application.

I question how safe it actually is - I&#x27;d assume it could impact a lot of other biological processes in the environment. They can change the way other compounds in the environment are absorbed by plant and animal tissue. At the same time, massive amounts of surfactants are already used with herbicides like roundup, so we do have an idea of how it might impact things - but that&#x27;s in an agricultural setting.

As others point out, this is (a) not susceptible to developing resistance, (b) applicable to lots of species besides mosquitoes, and (c) feels soapy if it lands on you.<p>For (b) and (c), it probably also has some effect on plants it lands on.

I learned recently from a bee keeping youtuber that the recommended method for euthanizing a problematic hive is just dumping in a bunch of soapy water which kills them for the same reason.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;O4ldpyIE5t4" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;O4ldpyIE5t4</a>

The drastic reduction in the number of bugs in our air scares me. it is a problem nobody’s talking about.

How about a foldable, indoor mosquito wall with a large surface area to increase the probability of mosquitoes zapping themselves?<p>DC current, just high enough to render em flightless and apart from the human in the room, no extra attractant is needed.

People have put a small layer of oil over stagnant water for a long time. It&#x27;s environmentally pretty innocuous (just use a plant oil) and stops them from breeding.

... if you manage to catch them with the spray, it doesn&#x27;t seem very practical.

Related: &quot;Mosquitoes survive raindrop collisions by virtue of their low mass&quot; by Dickerson et al. [1]; see also MITTechTV&#x27;s &quot;How mosquitoes fly in rain&quot; [2].<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pnas.org&#x2F;doi&#x2F;full&#x2F;10.1073&#x2F;pnas.1205446109" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pnas.org&#x2F;doi&#x2F;full&#x2F;10.1073&#x2F;pnas.1205446109</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;Akkjs1_FfMg" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;Akkjs1_FfMg</a>

As a pet owner, rather than using insecticides, I use a couple gallons of hot water mixed with washing-up liquid to eliminate fire ant nests in my yard.<p>The hot soapy water washes away the structue of the nest, and quickly kills the inhabitants, whilst not damaging my lawn, or having slow acting insecticides hurting my animals and getting into the wider food chain.

It&#x27;s relatively easy to make any surfactant. Good news for all of us needing to make a quick spritz to kill pesky mosquitos.

A simple fan can do wonders to keep mosquitos away. No chemicals needed … just a power source.

Mosquitos are pretty common in India and kills enough people, though roughly 8 times less than road accidents. Malaria is no longer very deadly but Dengue treatment indeed is pretty costly. Sometimes I feel that dengue cases are higher in cities than in villages.<p>Mosquitos are most active at dawn and dusk when people are usually out farming or just hanging out. Mosquito nets and mosquito repellent works well indoor.<p>Either you wipe out mosquitos species that cause malaria and dengue, or create vaccines and better drugs. Anything less than that is not going to be much effective. Personally I am against wiping out any species. The planet doesnt belong to us only.

I just use diluted IPA in a spray bottle. Kills almost all bugs near instantly and it&#x27;s relatively safe and very cheap.

Killing off mosquitoes will have an impact on the bird population.

So dawn soap? Nice!