This solar aerator is interesting but still a bit expensive and limited. I wonder what happens when buggies and fishies nibble at it and water inevitably leaks

This solar aerator is interesting but still a bit expensive and limited. I wonder what happens when buggies and fishies nibble at it and water inevitably leaks in. There are some cheaper solutions. The mosquito dunk costs less than $1 per application and is pretty easy to use--just toss a little puck into a pond, and the bacteria specific to mosquito larvae destroys the pest without causing any known side effects. There are also dragonflies. They, like mosquitoes, start life in the water and the nymphs are voracious eaters of mosquito larvae. Then, when they crawl out of the water and grow wings, they eat flying mosquitoes and other small insects in large quantities. If you seed your area with dragonflies, of course they will end up becoming food for bats and other predators which also eat mosquitoes but will preferentially go after larger, meatier insects. But on balance, a larger number of these creatures will keep the mosquito population down naturally and efficiently. It seems unlikely that introducing dragonflies to a specific area will unbalance the ecosystem. Dragonflies are ubiquitous in the world except for Antarctica. They are an ancient species and fossil records of giant dragonflies date back as far as 300 million years. The mystery to me is why we even still have mosquitoes, when we have such efficient and highly adapted killers of mosquitoes out there. Spraying is perhaps the worst possible approach of all of these. I've seen spraying done in urban areas that actually resulted in more mosquitoes in some neighborhoods. It either pushes the mosquitoes into new areas, or it inadvertently kills predators of mosquitoes. The best thing is to use as natural means as possible. That said... please, please find a way to wipe these critters out of existence. As discussed a few weeks ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7657251 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7657251) there are plenty of non-biting mosquitoes out there; only 200 out of 3,000 species feed on human blood. Life would go on just fine if we could genetically target those blood-sucking varieties and zero them out.