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Comment by kipple | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

Seems like this is the real meat, I wish the article had gone into more detail here.

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The main gist is to keep the water moving which they do with a combination of levees, aerators, and architecture features designed so water runs off instead of pooling on walkways and buildings.

Then they double down by stocking their water features with fish that particularly like to eat mosquito larvae.

Then the finishing move is using a garlic oil infused spray to drive away the adults.

Aha, the garlic spray explains why the place is crawling with children but relatively few adults in sight. :)

I was wondering why I had the faint taste of garlic bread in my mouth when I was there...

I don't know anything about how Disney does it aside from what I just read in the article, but mosquito fish I think are used in many places to get rid of mosquitoes. Guppies too, sometimes. I'm not sure if either is invasive in Florida.

Mosquito dunks are another approach. Basically, they're floating donut-shaped things that release a bacteria that's specifically harmful to mosquito larvae. That worked really well for me last fall; I had made myself a koi pond, but there weren't any koi for sale at the time and the mosquitoes were only too happy to fill the ecological void.

I think a lot of the industrial scale remediation for mosquitos also impacted the bird population. I have a Mosquito "pond" in the back yard and there is no noticeable increase in Mosquitos, for the most part they all get consumed by birds.

There was an old woman who swallowed a fly and all the got in return was a lifeless terrarium with 100 species we call Earth.

Potter did what politicians could never.

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