Why You Won’t Get A Mosquito Bite At Disney World

Disney World is billed as the happiest place on earth, and if you’re someone who loathes scratching mosquito bites in the summer, it could definitely be that spot for you.

While no method of repelling mosquitoes is 100% effective, Disney combines design, architecture, and good old-fashioned spray to keep their little corner of swampy Florida largely free from the annoying pests.

This is largely down to the innovations of MIT engineering expert Major General William “Joe” Potter. He and Walt Disney met at the 1964 World’s Fair and got to talking about Potter’s experience controlling mosquitoes when he served as the governor of the Panama Canal Zone.

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Disney hired him to do the same thing for the theme park that was, at that time, still a sparkle in his eye.

The methods put in place by Potter are mostly to prevent the bugs from setting up camp in the first place, rather than trying to kill them once they’re already there. He does this by making the park as unwelcoming to eggs as possible – and that starts and ends with standing water.

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Potter built drainage ditches around the park to remove all the water and to keep the water in the park constantly moving, says Christopher Lucas in Top Disney: 100 Top Ten Lists of the Best of Disney.

“The guests usually don’t notice it … but the water is constantly flowing. Whenever you walk by a body of water, there’s usually a fountain in the middle of it, or they’re doing something to keep it flowing.”

The buildings in the park are also designed to prevent that water from collecting, says Lucas.

“All the buildings are built so that water flows right off of them. With all the rainstorms, if water got caught on the buildings … it would form a pool, and then mosquitoes would hatch their eggs and you’d have thousands of mosquitoes. They made every building there curved, or designed in a way so there’d be no place for the water to catch and sit there. The architecture is really appealing to the eye, but it also serves a purpose: it makes it less conducive to mosquitoes.”

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As an added measure, the landscape architects also choose plants that are less likely to collect water.

“They also stock-fill those places with minnows, goldfish, and a type of fish called mosquito fish that eat the larvae.”

As a final barrier, the park does spray – but not pesticides. Instead they use liquid garlic.

“The amount they use is so small that humans can’t smell it, but mosquitoes are very susceptible to it.”

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Lucas confirms this is all thank to Potter, saying that there would certainly be “a problem today with mosquitoes” without his original efforts and education.

One more reason to feel good about dropping your dollar bucks at Disney World!