Mosquito-Fighting Drone Takes Flight in Broward County

From vast parks to wetlands to conservation areas, Broward is now using a drone to spray for mosquitoes in hard-to-reach places.

The drone hits the air with a payload of about 15 pounds of spray, enough to cover 3 acres at a time.

“It’s a huge difference,” says Cody Cash, an employee for Daytona Beach-based Leading Edge Aerial Technologies, which rents Broward the drone.

Until now, crews could spend days covering a single territory that’s inaccessible by truck, wading in mud, armed with a machete to get past bushy trees.

“These poor guys who have to go in there,” lamented Anh Ton, director of Broward’s Highway and Bridge Maintenance Division, a division of the county’s Public Works Department, which oversees its Mosquito Control Division.

Now, the drone is traveling to where the breed of mosquitoes called Aedes (a Greek word that means unpleasant) aegypti lay their eggs. It’s the predominant type of mosquito in South Florida and a vector of several viruses, including yellow fever virus, dengue virus, chikungunya and Zika virus.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention call mosquitoes the “world’s deadliest animal” because the diseases they transmit are responsible for more than 700,000 deaths worldwide every year.

In 2024, there have been seven cases of locally acquired dengue; one case was in Pasco County and the other six in Miami-Dade, according to the Florida Department of Health’s most recent weekly report.

Broward County started using drones more than two years ago for surveillance only, to pinpoint where the spraying needed to happen, Ton said. County engineers experimented with mosquito traps and vacant park land and dropped spray from the sky.

“We had been thinking about this for quite a while,” Ton said.

The pilot worked with a “significant reduction after the drone” strike. But in 2023, the drone use went beyond surveillance to begin spraying.

The county rents the spraying-abled drone for about $3,000 a month.

The drones are a good middle ground between people on land and using helicopters and planes — both of which are invasive in neighborhoods.

His company has more than 15 clients in Florida and California and serves dozens more for small-scale herbicide operations.

He recently helped with a mission over a section of Tree Tops Park in Davie. About 100 acres could be treated in four hours by drone, Cash said, versus a “guy would be out there for two to four days depending on wetness level.”

A drone can fly for about three minutes — its path plotted with the surveillance drone — and then returns, the battery switched, the product reloaded, and “off it goes again,” Ton said.

The county is targeting standing water, which is the breeding ground for the mosquitoes.

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