1. Introduction

Urban pest species are highly effective and opportunistic in their use of the physical, legal and administrative interstices of the landscape we inhabit, and Aedes mosquitoes are a case in

© 2016 The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and eproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. © 2018 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

point. Any inaccessible nook or cranny, any vacant land or neglected facility permits adult mosquitoes to hide and, in as little water as might accumulate in the lid of a bottle, find ideal breeding places. Aedes mosquitoes take advantage of the heterogeneous urban ecologies through "skip oviposition," laying a few eggs, spread across the largest possible number of sites. It is an especially well suited strategy for urban environments with abundant, but sparse and even temporary breeding sites [1].

The control of Aedes mosquitoes is failing in most tropical regions [1–3], and human diseases transmitted by this vector, like dengue, chikungunya, yellow fever and Zika, are among the top public health priorities [4, 5]. The strategies for suppressing mosquito populations below a threshold at which they no longer support viral amplification [6–10] has focused on two strategies [7, 11, 12]: (a) negating larval development opportunities by eliminating breeding places and the sites of immature stages; and (b) killing adults by fumigation with insecticides. More recently biomolecular and biogenetic approaches have also been suggested, although their effectiveness under field conditions are uncertain [13, 14]. Therefore new approaches are urgently needed, especially in urban landscapes [15].

Here we propose that an important strategic aspect that is currently overlooked in Aedes control programs: recognition of the complexity of urban ecologies in terms of land ownership, enforcement and accessibility for control interventions. We suggest that a systematic strategy that accounts for this physical complexity is essential to best implement Aedes control.
