How to build a mosquito trap that saves lives

This article is taken from Five Gallon Ideas, which features over 100 uses for 5 gallon buckets with more being added all the time.

Not so long ago we wrote an article explaining different mosquito traps you can use to keep yourself from being bitten. In the years since then, mosquitoes have sadly become an even bigger problem for many people, spreading viruses like Zika in tropical climates.

In countries like Brazil, insecticides are regularly sprayed in an effort to get rid of the mosquitoes, but insecticides always have undesirable side-effects, like the harm they can cause to people’s health. There are however, other solutions out there that can work as well.

The trap we will show you here is a type of ovitrap. Ovitraps are designed to resemble the preferred breeding ground of mosquitoes, to capture mosquitoes that have already bitten people and now carry eggs they’re hoping to deposit. Ovitraps work against two of the most dangerous types of mosquitoes, Aedes albopictus and Aedes aegypti.

These eggs will become larvae. Those larvae grow up to be new mosquitoes that continue the cycle. Capture these egg-carrying mosquitoes and you stop the cycle! The people of Mosquitoes without Borders who developed this trap did a lot of research and came up with a simple low-cost Ovitrap design that you can build in your own home.

Take a look at their ingenious design:

This net is placed into a bottle. The mosquito enters from the left. It climbs over the ramp to end up in the bottle. The problem for the mosquito however, is that when it gets in, it has no way of getting out again! The mosquito ends up stuck in the bottle you insert the net into. At the bottom of the net below the net is the stagnant water that the mosquito deposits its larvae in.

Here you can see the full design:

That looks pretty simple, doesn’t it? Well, it is simple, but it works! You can easily set up these traps around your house yourself. The designers have put up a free guide demonstrating how to set up this mosquito trap yourself. You can find their DIY ovitrap design here!

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