Image of 1 million Florida mosquitoes chills social media. ‘Makes me itch to look’

A photo of one million dead mosquitoes is giving people the willies on social media, but the scariest part may be that all of them came from one section of a Southwest Florida neighborhood.

The pile stands 8 inches tall and about 18 inches across ... and amounts to about 5 gallons of dead bugs.

Multiple photos of their little corpses were shared Feb. 16 on Facebook by Lee County Mosquito Control District in Florida. The coastal county is about 150 miles southeast of Tampa.

“Ever wonder what 1 million mosquitoes looks like?” the agency wrote. “Check out the results of an LCMCD trapping project that took place in one section of one neighborhood on Sanibel Island over the summer of 2021.”

Sanibel Island is a tourist hub along the Gulf of Mexico, “famed for its sunsets, lighthouse and luxurious resorts,” Visitflorida.com says.

Mosquitoes aren’t mentioned in the brochures, but “Lee County’s many acres of salt marsh and other wetlands are some of the most prolific mosquito breeding habitats on earth,” the county says.

Given that, one million mosquitoes is hardly a drop in the bucket, some noted on social media.

“That means the island probably has 3 billion mosquitoes,” Dave Tyrrell of Fort Myers wrote on Facebook.

County mosquito control officials didn’t say how the 1 million insects were trapped, but the six-decade-old agency specializes in developing new ways to kill them.

How they died wasn’t what social media commenters were asking, however.

“I’m curious how they counted them,” Stefan Williamson asked.

“I want to know who sat there for hours, with what I can only imagine was a pair of tweezers, and counted them all?” Natalie Kristine asked.

“Makes me itch to look at them,” Lois McGee said.

This story was originally published February 17, 2022 at 10:30 AM with the headline "Image of 1 million Florida mosquitoes chills social media. ‘Makes me itch to look’."