As the weather turns warm in Seoul, there is one common concern of all Seoulites which trancends soccer and politics — mosquitos!
Towards this end, I discovered an experiment done by a Taiwanese elementary school that may work. The beauty of this is that the ingredients are cheap and easy to find, except maybe the yeast, which I had to search all over Naksongdae for.
The idea is that mosquitos use their keen sense of smell to locate their prey (Seoulites). Being that the octanal or carbon dioxide in ones breathe is what draws them, the carbon dioxide from the growing yeast is actually an attractant. Once the mosquito flys into the inverted bottle neck of the trap, the “mogi” become disoriented (no pun here), lose faith in “Ouridang” and drop into the yeast brew, which in turn drowns them after having one hell of a party.
I recruited a young lady who is in the first grade to provide the necessary artwork and label so that no one might mistake this for my homebrew makoli and start swigging on it.
I plan on releasing a hopefully gory update in a day or two as to the effectiveness of this trap whereupon I might set a larger number of traps in my building. Naturally, this beats throwing books at the walls, in frustration, at two in the morning because of that keen whinning sound of mogi on the attack.
The webpage with instructions can be found here: mogi trap and the original Chinese website is here.
{ 22 comments… read them below or add one }
I’ve seen homemade and commerical versions of this contraption in action, they DO WORK pretty well. Essentially, this machine of yours is a homemade version of the commerical appliance that burns butane to produce heat and subsequently releases CO2, except the commercial version uses a net and bottle to trap them in and also covers a couple acres of area.
Why does the Asian variety of mosquito(e)s hurt more and cause so much swelling compared to the results of the American mosquito(e)s?
–Remort
Malaria.
Could you tell us more about your homebrew makoli also?
If you’re looking for yeast, you can ask at your local bakery. They’ll probably sell you a pound of baker’s yeast (looks like a pound of butter) for about 1,500 won or so. You have to use it pretty much immediately, though.
The mogis around here go for my wife and daughter and leave me alone. It’s that pure barabrian blood they don’t like, I guess.
Bluejives, I’m considering putting in rice in a week and adding pine needles to the mix, whereupon I will change the label to read “Makoli”. I figure, with the mosquitos, this should make an interesting makoli.
Spewer, I have had other couples tell me the same: mogi like Hanguk blood more than caucasian. I could not guess why either but I can assure you that having bad taste is not the same as tasting terrible.
That’s interesting — my wife and daughters are plagued by mosquitoes in the summer, while I never get bitten. Maybe the local bugs are evolved to prefer the odor of kimchi and to revile the odor of Lurpak butter.
Robert, you keep getting these spam tracking comments from robots that link back to an IP address at EVONET Belgium which, in turn, some of which point back to a spammer in Bulgaria.
Perhaps you might modify your spam filter to kill these since my mogi traps are useless.
I pretty much had the opposite experience in my time in Korea. Every summer mosquito season, I would literally get bitten almost a hundred times by the mosquitos, while my wife (Korean) would maybe get bitten ten times or so.
Zonath,
We Americans look like a 32oz prime rib to those nasty mosquitoes.
skindleshanks wrote:
If you’re looking for yeast, you can ask at your local bakery. They’ll probably sell you a pound of baker’s yeast (looks like a pound of butter) for about 1,500 won or so. You have to use it pretty much immediately, though.
Small packets of yeast are available at E-Mart. It’s called 이스트 in Korean. It comes in what looks like small pellets. It’s used for breadmakers.
R. Elgin wrote:
Spewer, I have had other couples tell me the same: mogi like Hanguk blood more than caucasian. I could not guess why either but I can assure you that having bad taste is not the same as tasting terrible.
Back when I was sleeping with the sisters and cousins of Caucasian guys who would try sleep with as many Korean women as possible, a few of them would end up with dozens of mogi bites by morning, whereas I would have none or just one or two in the same room. The mogi were all buzzing me just the same.
I think what’s at work here is that some people get bitten, just as much, but the immune system handles it differently, so the itchy bites don’t stick around in some people. All the intra-peninsular inbreeding could have made some Koreans susceptible not to the bites themselves but to the bodily reaction afterward.
Back when I was sleeping with the sisters and cousins of Caucasian guys who would try sleep with as many Korean women as possible.
I’m offended! Kushibo has been endangering the welfare of our sisters! Rally the Caucasian netizens!
(Tongue is now removed from cheek.)
R.Elgin, thanks for the tip. Please tell your young artist that her design is very hip and happening.
Kushibo _is_ white, so don’t everyone go gaga over his tongue-in-cheek comment.
Anyway, I get bit all the time, so I really doubt the mosquitos have been affected by the prejudices of their human counterparts.
I do indeed have a significant amount of “Caucasian blood” flowing through my veins. One would think my whiteness iis apparent from pictures I’ve posted. And I guess that makes me all the more entitled to bed the sisters and cousins of the English-teaching and law-talking lotharios.
All’s fair in ublove and war, eh?
My comment was a joke too – aimed at the absurdity of singling out one group (or person) for blame for the “moral decline” of another group. I thought that was clear, but since my writing is sh*t these days, it’s quite possible it wasn’t; so here I am driveling on.
Time for lunch.
I am of Korean descent but don’t get bitten by mosquitoes much, save for one weekend in Chuncheon when I stupidly left the window open in a drunken haze and awake the next morning to find my legs completely covered with bites. Remort is right, Asian mosquitoes are brutal; I never get bitten like that here (LA). I think the ones you see in Korea are probably a different species or maybe even genus (?) than the ones you normally encounter in North America.
I’ve also heard conflicting stories about how often Asians and Caucasians are bitten by mosquitoes and tried to look it up- didn’t find anything conclusive about the correlation between race/diet and bites but it’s still sort of interesting:
“Scientists do know that genetics account for a whopping 85% of our susceptibility to mosquito bites. They’ve also identified certain elements of our body chemistry that, when found in excess on the skin’s surface, make mosquitoes swarm closer.
‘People with high concentrations of steroids or cholesterol on their skin surface attract mosquitoes,’ Butler tells WebMD. That doesn’t necessarily mean that mosquitoes prey on people with higher overall levels of cholesterol, Butler explains. These people simply may be more efficient at processing cholesterol, the byproducts of which remain on the skin’s surface.
Mosquitoes also target people who produce excess amounts of certain acids, such as uric acid, explains entomologist John Edman, PhD, spokesman for the Entomological Society of America. These substances can trigger the mosquitoes’ olfactory sensations, or sense of smell, causing them to launch their “landing” onto unsuspecting victims.”
http://foxnews.webmd.com/content/article/90/100719.htm?src=rss_foxnews
Also:
“The females of blood sucking species locate their victims primarily through scent. They are extremely sensitive to the carbon dioxide in exhaled breath, as well as several substances found in sweat. Some people seem to attract mosquitoes more than others. Empirical studies of mosquito bites suggest that the risk of being bitten follows an approximately negative binomial distribution. Being male, being overweight, and having type ‘O’ blood may increase the risk of being bitten. Mosquitoes can detect heat, so they can find warm-blooded mammals and birds very easily once they get close enough.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosquitoes#Natural_history
All these comments are well and nice, but the burning question remains – does the contraption work?
Zhang, so far the traps work just a little. It seems that if people are around, the mosquitos prefer people over the traps if the two are in the same area. I guess this means I need to put these traps out away from people. Position seems to be important.
I get bugged plenty by mosquitoes in Korea, even if I shower before bed. I suspect different people handle the bits differently, but also that some people attract mogi more than others. It could be the pecularities of body chemistry, as well, especially with relation to how that affects body scent. Apparently I smell good… to mogi, anyway.
Robert: Let’s see the carnage of mosquito corpses!
–Remort
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