Hold the Methoprene Spray
At their meeting on Monday, the East Hampton Town Trustees basked in the Nov. 4 State Supreme Court decision dismissing private property owners’ claims to sections of the beach at Napeague, but they quickly turned their attention to the use of a mosquito larvicide called methoprene on the lands and waterways under their jurisdiction.
Kevin McAllister, the founder of the advocacy group called Defend H2O and the former Peconic Baykeeper, told the trustees the time had come to renew calls to ban marshland application of the chemical, which he said is deadly to nontarget species and detrimental to wildlife habitat.
This month and next, Mr. McAllister said, the Suffolk County Legislature will determine 2017 vector control plans. He asked the trustees to send letters to the Legislature, its health committee, and the Suffolk County Council on Environmental Quality. If past years are a guide, he said plans “will presumably include methoprene,” which he called “an aerial assault on tidal marshes with a poison.”
Though the county’s Department of Public Works maintains that methoprene is harmless to nontarget species, studies have asserted otherwise. A study in the Journal of Crustacean Biology in 1999, for example, stated that methoprene causes structural and biochemical alterations in larval and adult blue crabs. The study suggested that exposure at minute concentrations reduced the number of successful hatchings and resulted in lethargic behavior in surviving larvae.
“We don’t see collateral damage,” Mr. McAllister said. “I think it occurs at a microscopic level. It’s a bad poison. With all the efforts to try to reverse water quality degradation, this is one that just continues to go on with no real justification.”
The county maintains that aerial spraying is necessary to control mosquitos, which can infect humans with the West Nile virus. It has reported five cases of West Nile so far in 2016, in Brookhaven, Smithtown, and Islip.
Mr. McAllister said he would attend a Legislature meeting to press the point and hoped to be accompanied by lobstermen from Connecticut, where a law banning both methoprene and resmethrin, an adulticide, in coastal areas went into effect in 2013. “They’ve been very active on this issue for a number of years. They have joined me in the past before the Legislature. They’re continuously calling me: ‘Why can’t Suffolk County get it?’ ”
Brian Byrnes, a trustee, said that town residents he has spoken with are generally opposed to the use of methoprene, and asked if county policy could be superseded. Mr. McCallister said the State Department of Environmental Conservation bans the use of methoprene on state-managed wetlands, but a spokesman for the D.E.C. told The Star yesterday that there is no such ban although a permit is required.
Application of chemicals for mosquito control is exempt under tidal wetlands regulations, and the county’s Public Works Department’s vector control division has an active permit to work on D.E.C. tidal wetlands in Region 1. The permit, he said, has a detailed protocol for the conditions in which methoprene can be applied.
There has been no action on methoprene use by the Environmental Protection Agency, Ms. McAllister said. “Ultimately the E.P.A. is going to rely upon emerging science that comes out . . . but also you have the mosquito-pesticide industry generating science that says it’s perfectly fine.”
Francis Bock, the trustees’ clerk, told Mr. McAllister that the trustees would register their opposition to methoprene with the Legislature. “Consider it done,” he said.