Ernie Reyes’ Whale of a Mosquitofish Story

How many of us get to make our jobs 100 times more productive — literally?

That’s exactly what Ernesto Reyes did, a feat that helped him become the Department of Environmental Health’s HEART Employee of the Quarter earlier this year.

All it took was some encouragement, networking, study and teamwork — and some plumbing pipe and high-density biofilter pads.

Plumbing pipe and biofilter pads? Sounds fishy. And it is, sort of. Mosquito-fishy.

See, Reyes, who goes by Ernie, has a big smile, ramrod posture and an iron grip, helped exponentially increase the County Vector Control Program’s production of mosquitofish. They’re the stars of one of the program’s most popular, disease-fighting programs.

Reyes did it in part by building plumbing pipe and biofilter “nests” where tiny, newborn mosquitofish could escape being eaten by their own hungry parents and grow into mosquito-larvae eating adult mosquitofish themselves.

Vector Control has given out thousands of free mosquitofish to the public at a dozen locations over the years. Placed in neglected “green” swimming pools and spas, ornamental ponds, fountains, bird baths and even horse troughs, mosquitofish can gobble up mosquito larvae as fast as mosquitoes can lay their eggs in water. That means fewer mosquitoes that can transmit diseases like West Nile virus from birds to people.

However, Vector Control’s mosquitofish breeding wasn’t very prolific at the County Operations Center when DEH and Vector Control hired Reyes about a year and a half ago — producing about 50 baby mosquitofish a month. Reyes eventually helped multiply that 100-fold, to 5,000 mosquitofish a month.

Reyes grew up in El Cajon. He joined the Navy where he worked as a hospital corpsman, including six months tending wounded in Afghanistan, then went back to college to study biology. So, he didn’t know anything about mosquitofish when DEH hired him to work as a shop technician, maintaining Vector Control’s traps, equipment, pesticides, and — the fish room.

The fish room is one of two places Vector Control keeps its mosquitofish. The first is in a pond near Lake Hodges. The second is in several black, 500-gallon, temperature-controlled tubs in DEH’s fish room at the County Operation Center.

When Reyes started with Vector, most of the mosquitofish breeding was done at the pond. A couple of times a week he or other technicians would drive up to the pond, “fish” for mosquitofish and bring them back to the holding tanks at the COC. After a few months, Reyes’ supervisor, County Veterinarian Dr. Nikos Gurfield, encouraged Reyes to think about whether they could boost breeding in the holding tanks.

With Gurfield’s support, Reyes reached out to other agencies and experts, including Mike Saba, then a biologist with the Orange County Vector Control District. Saba brought Reyes into the Mosquitofish and Biocontrol subcommittee of the Mosquito and Vector Control Association of California — a collection of roughly 70 vector control agencies and districts. Suddenly Reyes was swimming in mosquitofish information.

“I had no idea there were so many people dedicated to this,” Reyes said.

He learned the County wasn’t feeding its mosquitofish enough and increased feeding from four times a day to every hour of the workday.

That boosted reproduction, but it still left a problem. See, mosquitofish eat their young.

Mosquitofish are used as a mosquito-fighting tool because of their voracious appetites. They bear their young live, and the adults will eat the newborns if the little ones can’t find places to hide.

Reyes said through his work on the subcommittee, he had heard about a biofilter called Matala. It’s thick and mat-like, often used for water filtration, but also in mosquitofish breeding. Baby mosquitofish are much smaller than adults, and the twisting coils of the Matala were just big enough for baby mosquitofish to swim through and small enough to keep the hungry adults out.

Reyes’ biofilter and plumbing pipe mosquitofish haven.

Working with his Vector Control teammates, Reyes stitched together waffle-thick slabs of Matala to form open-topped boxes and attached them to buoyant plumbing-pipe frames. The safe havens were set afloat in the 500-gallon breeding tubs.

Now, the baby mosquitofish could swim up into the boxes for safety. Vector Control technicians scoop the baby mosquitofish out of the boxes and put them in separate tanks until they grow large enough to re-join the adults.

“Almost instantaneously we started seeing really good results,” Reyes said.

He tracked the improvement by scooping the babies into a clear container, taking photos, hand counting them on his computer and charting the progress on an excel data sheet.

The result? Mosquitofish reproduction jumped 100 times over, all for about $500 in equipment.

Reyes moved on from Vector Control in June. He’s still working with environmental health, but now as a food inspector. He said being recognized as the department’s employee of the quarter for the mosquitofish program was really rewarding, from a team perspective.

“It was nice to have that as a capstone to my time at Vector,” Reyes said. “I really worked with a lot of great people there. It wasn’t just Nikos (Gurfield), it was everybody there who was constantly offering feedback and really asking for a lot. It helped me grow as a professional.”