Ohioans use wind blowers and snowplows to clear ‘trillions’ of dead mayflies after city is infested
Call in the SWAT team.
Ohioans resorted to using leaf blowers to clear swarms of mayflies that dropped dead after infesting a lakeside city.
Millions of bug corpses are piling up in doorways and driveways across Port Clinton, leaving residents with little choice but to treat the creepy crawlies like fallen leaves.
“They’ve been blown off and everything, but they’re still … these ones are stuck there because someone ran them over,” Blake Wellman said in a Monday video he took of himself blowing the insects off his business’s property.
“I already came through here and got them off the windows, so it doesn’t look terrible, but yeah tomorrow it’ll be just as thick.”
Another neighbor, Northern Exposure Candle Co. owner Billy Rigoni, took the bug-calypse cleanup one step further and used his snowplow to scoop the flies from his property, 13 ABC reported.
“Sunday night, that was probably the worst swarm we’ve seen in quite some time. They invaded by the trillions,” Port Clinton’s mayor Mike Snider told the outlet.
According to Snider, charter boat captains typically tip the city off to when mayfly eggs hatch on the lake — giving power company First Energy enough time to cut off street lights, which attract the swarms.
“Unfortunately, we missed it by one day,” Snider said.
While the mayfly infestation was intense this spring, it appears their overwhelming populations are already starting to wane.
The critters, which don’t bite or sting, only live for about one day upon reaching adult age.
