Life
and Times of the Scottish Midge
7
November 2002
Alison
Blackwell gave a very interesting talk and slide show on the work she
and her team have been doing in trying to eradicate the Scottish
Midge. We saw slides of
midge traps which were set up during the filming of the TV series
Monarch of the Glen. There
were millions of midges in these traps after only a few hours but
placing these around
Scotland
would not exactly be an easy task. Perhaps the
Scottish Parliament might consider setting up a Ministry for the Midge
and could employ hundreds of people to constantly empty midge traps
around the country!
How
can a tiny dipteran fly cause so much havock?
Only the female midges bite to feed their eggs.
There are 34 known species of biting midges in
Scotland
– only 5 of these species attack humans.
90% of attacks are made by one species, Culicodes
impunctatus and I think this
species rules in the Scottish hills! For some reason this species
appears to be more ferocious than the same species located elsewhere
in the world. Perhaps the
British blood is much more tasty than
elsewhere.
It
is estimated in prominent midge infested areas, such as
Western Scotland
, one Hectare can on average contain 24,000,000
midge larvae.
What
we all wanted to know was if Alison had discovered a remedy for this
horrendous problem. Unfortunately
she is still working on it. However,
Avon seem to have come up with a cream called Skin So Soft which has
had good reports so far, even the army have been using it.
Time will tell if we will ever conquer this pest.
It
was a very interesting talk and everyone enjoyed it even though Alison
didn’t have a miracle cure... at least not yet!
Elizabeth
Maitland
