It's the only site on the list because of a bug. The Asian longhorned beetle is destroying thousands of hardwood trees in Chicago and New York City, threatening to turn shady neighborhoods into urban deserts. In some places, researchers are turning to high-tech and unorthodox weapons. University of Kentucky scientists fly a radar-equipped airplane over the Ohio River Valley to find the Asian tiger mosquito. The mosquitoes don't make a radar blip, but the radar can spot hidden mounds of scrap tires, where the insects breed.
Tiger mosquitoes love tires.
They arrived in 1985 in a Japanese container shipment headed for a Houston recapping plant. They have spread to 25 states and followed trade routes to Africa and South America, too. Aggressive biters, tiger mosquitoes transmit 17 potentially fatal tropical viruses, including dengue fever, yellow fever and forms of encephalitis. One dengue epidemic linked to the tiger mosquito in Rio de Janeiro infected 1 million people. Biologists believe the Black Sea natives were stowaways in ballast water of cargo ships that was discharged into Lake St. Clair near Detroit in the late 1980s.