Western Standard - June 23, 2026


Why Calgary's mosquito numbers haven't exploded — yet

Mentioned
Culex
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Episode Stats


Length

1 minute

Words per minute

204.0

Word count

388

Sentence count

21


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, we talk to Dr. Kelly, an assistant professor at the University of Calgary, who studies mosquitoes here in Calgary, elsewhere in Canada, and around the bush. We talk about the invasive species the northern house mosquito, Culex piviens, which is new to Alberta and somewhat new to Calgary, and its impact on West Nile Virus.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 I'm an assistant professor at the University of Calgary,
00:00:02.500 and I run a research program that studies mosquitoes
00:00:04.580 here in Calgary, elsewhere in Canada and around the bush.
00:00:08.780 So this year, it's still been very light in numbers.
00:00:10.980 We were interested to find that one of the first mosquitoes
00:00:14.680 we caught this year is actually an invasive species
00:00:16.860 that is relatively new to Alberta
00:00:18.920 and somewhat new to Calgary.
00:00:21.800 So we first found that mosquito in 2022,
00:00:24.300 working with the city.
00:00:25.400 It was previously found in Edmonton in 2018,
00:00:27.620 and that is the northern house mosquito, Culex piviens.
00:00:30.660 So this mosquito is new to Alberta,
00:00:34.160 but it's not new to Canada.
00:00:35.280 However, it's primarily found out east in higher numbers,
00:00:38.880 and there it is one of the main vectors of West Nile virus.
00:00:41.980 So that's been a little bit of a concern for us here.
00:00:43.860 We don't know if that mosquito is changing
00:00:46.260 West Nile dynamics in Calgary yet,
00:00:48.180 but that is one thing my lab is researching.
00:00:50.580 So if you get bitten by a mosquito that has West Nile,
00:00:53.380 for most people, they end up with no symptoms at all.
00:00:56.420 There are a small number of people
00:00:57.940 that after being infected by West Nile,
00:00:59.880 they end up with flu-like symptoms.
00:01:01.640 And then there's an even smaller percentage of people
00:01:03.780 that end up with rain swelling and encephalitis
00:01:06.140 that can do quite that for now.
00:01:07.900 A bad mosquito season is if we have lots
00:01:10.600 of really heavy rainfall followed by warm temperatures.
00:01:14.140 As soon as things start to heat up,
00:01:15.560 we'll start to see those adults being active.
00:01:18.540 Yeah, so we do have mosquitoes in Calgary
00:01:20.200 that spread West Nile.
00:01:21.180 And so we always ask people to do things like wear bug spray,
00:01:25.320 reduce your risk of basically getting mosquito bites,
00:01:27.480 whether that's for using insect repellent,
00:01:29.640 wearing long clothes and long pants,
00:01:31.640 adjusting your activity periods
00:01:33.040 to time where mosquitoes are less active.
00:01:35.720 So West Nile is endemic to Canada now.
00:01:38.280 It is found all from coast to coast.
00:01:41.200 Certain places do have higher incidence
00:01:43.080 of West Nile than others.
00:01:44.080 And generally, Alberta is relatively low
00:01:46.040 compared to Eastern Canada.
00:01:47.560 But it's still a virus that we track here,
00:01:50.160 especially now where we test mosquitoes
00:01:52.160 that we catch here in Calgary,
00:01:53.160 for where it's much money.