HURON – Experts still have questions about the world of mosquitoes, that pesky insect of summer that can make people miserable at a minimum and seriously ill in worst case scenarios.
But there is plenty they do know, and each year Dr. Geoffrey Vincent, from the Department of Biology and Microbiology at South Dakota State University, has taught others in parks and recreation departments in the state how to identify the different species.
He was in Huron on Thursday.
Nuisance mosquitoes comprise 80 to 90 percent of the mosquitoes in this area. The species that people need to be concerned about are Culex Tarsalis and Culex Pipiens, which are vectors, or carriers, of the West Nile Virus.
Vincent, who just recently obtained his doctorate and in a couple weeks is off to northern Wisconsin for a new challenge, said the information local communities send to the state health department on mosquitoes they have trapped is important for West Nile Virus predictions each year.
He said he can make some predictions based on weather and soil and air temperatures.
“But it's like any other long-range forecast,” he said. “You get this very vague picture. But what these communities, including Huron, do is incredibly important. They collect these mosquitoes that transmit West Nile Virus and send it into the health department so that we know how many of them are infected.
“That's when we get kind of a short-range forecast where we're getting a really clear picture and can make fairly accurate predictions on West Nile Virus,” Vincent said.
There are 42 different species of mosquitoes in South Dakota. He can regularly identify 14 of them, using one kind of trap. If he used a variety of traps, he expects he would catch more species.
While most found in the eastern part of the state are classified as nuisance mosquitoes, at certain times of the year that's all that is being trapped here.
Closer to the center of the state around the Missouri River, the Culex Tarsalis species is more prevalent, he said.

Nuisance mosquitoes can't sicken people, but they can make their lives miserable. They can swarm and ruin outdoor events and send people indoors to escape them.
Culex Tarsalis are not as prominent, but they can have a real impact when they pass on the virus, he said.
They are not yet out in full force. A long-range prediction is that they will cause 40 to 80 cases of West Nile Virus in the state this year. Eighty cases is a high number when one takes into consideration the population of the state.
In low years, there are only two cases. In bad years, like 2012, there can be more than 200.
“As far as the transmission goes, it's reliant on how many of these vector mosquitoes are actually infected,” Vincent said. “We try to assess what causes their infection rate to go up or down.”
The jury is still mostly out about that.
In a strange way, West Nile Virus doesn't really want to be in humans, he said. “We're what we call a dead-end host.”
When a person gets the virus, he or she remains indoors at home or in the hospital, where mosquitoes can no longer bite them and then pass the virus on to someone or something else.
Initially, mosquitoes get infected when they feed on sick birds, but at some point the cycle of mosquito to bird and bird to mosquito passes and mosquitoes start infecting humans.
“I would love to be able to say which bird here is the culprit, but there's competing ideas,” Vincent said.
“Migratory birds? Are they bringing it in from down south where mosquitoes are active all year round?” he said. “Is it remaining in robins? Some places will blame the robins, some places will blame the sparrows.”
Nuisance mosquitoes don't survive winter as adults. They will lay their eggs and then die off. In the spring, the eggs will hatch when the rains begin.
Tarsalis mosquitoes do over-winter as adults, burrowing underground where the temperature and humidity will allow them to survive.
With microscopes, Vincent taught Abby Skonseng, Charleen Kleinlein and Todd Preston, seasonal workers with the parks and recreation department, how to identify the different species.
“This is a male,” he said of one of them. “We do not care about the males at all. Males do not bite humans, they're pollinators, they only feed on nectar.”
 Vincent will soon leave South Dakota for a position at Northland College in Ashland, Wis.
There are challenges with mosquitoes there, too, of course, but he will also be working to uncover mysteries with Lyme disease and Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever carried by ticks.
“These kinds of things need to be looked at and monitored as well, just like we monitor West Nile Virus out here,” he said.

PHOTO BY ROGER LARSEN/PLAINSMAN
Huron Parks employee Abby Skonseng looks on as Dr. Geoffrey Vincent prepares a sample of mosquitoes for her to examine in a training session on how to identify different species caught in Huron traps.