Arthropod Problems in Recreation Areas

Arthropod problems have been present in many areas of the New World now used for recreational purposes since before the first settlement by European immigrants. The earliest recorded confrontation occurred on the Atlantic coast where, to this day, many of the same arthropod pests continue to harass both the local residents and the hapless tourists. Dove, Hall & Hull (43) described accounts of the sand fly (Culicoides) infestations present along the south Atlantic coast when only the Creek Indians resided there and, later, during the Civil War, and they concluded that . . . we share the opinion that these biting insects were largely responsible for the lack of early development of the southern areas along the Atlantic Seaboard. lamnback (61) quoted an early visitor (1771) to New York. I never saw the muskitoes more plentiful in any part of America than they are here. They are so eager for our blood that we could not rest all the night, though we had surrounded ourselves with fire. There are numerous accounts of the enthusiasm with which swarms of black flies and mosquitoes surrounded early travelers in eastern Canada and the northeastern United States during the pre-Revolutionary War period, and explorers and early settlers in the Great Lakes regions of both countries wrote lurid accounts of the misery inflicted by the variety of biting insects they found there. The Forty-Niners and other westbound settlers in the mid-1800s encountered large numbers of mosquitoes in the Mississippi valley and, while in transit through that area, became ill with malaria transmitted by the indigenous Anopheles. At times the incidence and severity of the disease was so severe that wagon trains were forced to disband or turn back (T. B. Hall, personal communication). Upon their arrival in Utah the first Mormon pioneers found large numbers of mosquitoes breeding in the waterway flowing through the arid Salt Lake valley, and trappers and early settlers in the high valleys of the Rocky and Sierra Nevada Mountains also found these areas swarming with mosquitoes in early summer (D. M. Rees, personal communication). Although some of these arthropod problems were eliminated or minimized as areas of North America were settled and developed, many of the regions with these problems were bypassed and only now, because of their natural attributes and the