46 AGRICULTURAL EXPERIMENT STATION. 



Dark, woodland swamps breed few mosquitoes of any kind, 

 and such as do occur there are not troublesome and do not get 

 away from their dark haunts. Very few wrigglers of any kind 

 are found in sphagnum swamps, open or overgrown, and none 

 that do occur there are at all troublesome. 



Areas densely overgrown by cattails are safe as mosquito 

 breeders, contrar}^ to general belief. The hundreds of acres of 

 such area in the Hackensack Valley do not furnish any of the 

 supply for the neighboring towns. I have been over such swamps 

 many times and my assistants have spent days in searching 

 through them. Adult mosquitoes were often plentiful enough, 

 but their larvae were never found. 



Salt ponds, large or small, on the marshes are always safe, 

 because they almost always have perpendicular banks and are 

 stocked with fish and other marine life at every tide that fills them. 

 So a marsh that is covered at ordinary high tides can never breed 

 mosquitoes. Nor can a flat marsh area with scant vegetation, 

 from which the water drains completely, become a source of 

 danger. Where fiddler crabs occur in numbers over a stretch 

 of marsh land their holes drain it so completely that wrigglers 

 have no chance. More than half of the entire marsh area along" 

 the New Jersey coast comes under the "safe" heading and breeds 

 no mosquitoes of any kind. 



Any pool or puddle of water, no matter how produced, in a 

 road, a ditch or gutter, a depression in a city lot or a low meadow, 

 that holds water for a week, may and usually does breed mos- 

 quitoes. A half filled pail, or tub, a horse trough, even an iron 

 bucket or tin can that holds water will be apt to have a wriggler 

 population, and the species will be usually pipiens or restuans, 

 with a sprinkling of Anopheles. In cities, and especially in the 

 smaller, incompletely sewered cities and in the outskirts, ne- 

 glected gutters taking house waste or forming pockets that hold 

 water are good sources of local supply. Sewer catch basins are 

 very often good breeders and so are cesspools and pits for liquid 

 manure. Water barrels have an established reputation in this 

 line, and so have shallow cisterns. In fact there is no pool or 

 body of water sO' small or sO' foul as not to breed the common 

 house mosquitoes, and this may be indoors as well as out. 



An open swamp area, broken by hummocks of grass and partly 

 filled with reeds, rushes, spatterdock and lily pads, with shallow, 

 overgrown edges, ofifers ideal conditions for Anopheles, because 

 these may find shelter among the vegetation even if fish are pres- 

 ent. Wooded swamp areas like the Great Piece Meadows and 

 other similar stretches along the Passaic, have numerous pools 

 so situated as to form ideal breeding places for Culex sylvestris. 



