THE coalition that wages Florida’s eternal battle against mosquitoes is both fearsome and eclectic. Helicopters and fleets of trucks are used to nix larvae and kill insects on the wing; traps baited with dry ice help to monitor them. There are animate weapons, too. Flocks of sentinel chickens, on which some mosquitoes like to munch, are maintained at strategic locations. Then there are mosquitofish, bug-eyed relatives of the guppy that are deployed in barrels and fountains.

Tropical yet wealthy, Florida is “king of the hill” in the mosquito-control world, says Ron Montgomery, Hillsborough County’s veteran mosquito-buster-in-chief. His team of zappers, and those across Tampa Bay in Pinellas County, are on a new front line of the struggle against Aedes aegypti, one of the species that carries the Zika virus. Local transmission—whereby patients contract the virus in America, rather than bringing it home with them—has mostly been confined to the artsy Wynwood district of Miami and the fleshpot of Miami Beach. But one of Florida’s 46 such cases (so far) was found in Pinellas, in a woman said to have worked in Hillsborough. “Our job is to kill mosquitoes,” Mr Montgomery says at his bunker-like HQ on the outskirts of Tampa. “And we take it very seriously.”

Naturally, politicians are the face of this counter-insurgency. Mosquitoes and politics have long been entwined in Florida—some counties elect dedicated mosquito commissioners—but this year, Zika and the bugs that convey it have infected races across the ballot. Amid an epidemic of hyperactive credit-seeking and partisan blame, everyone criticises Congress for failing to pass emergency funding before its summer recess (the Centres for Disease Control’s director said this week that the available money had almost run out). Democrats assail Rick Scott, Florida’s Republican governor, for previous state budget cuts. Patrick Murphy, victor in their senatorial primary on August 30th, lambasts Marco Rubio, his confirmed Republican opponent in November. Some Tampa–area politicians are agitating for the release of genetically modified mosquitoes, currently slated for a trial in the Keys, which might cut the Zika-spreading population.

As in an actual war, however, the political grandstanding is a sideshow. The real combatants are the mosquito-control operatives, whose tools include their own bodies. As Rob Krueger of the Pinellas squad recounts, one form of surveillance involves standing in a buzzy spot and seeing how many mosquitoes land on him in a minute. “You end up with a lot of mosquito bites,” he says as his boss, Jason Stuck, brings in the eggs from a reserve battalion of chickens. West Nile virus, eastern equine encephalitis: other diseases are carried by Florida’s numerous mosquito species, but Zika is the focus of anxiety because of its impact on tourism—partial travel advisories for the affected bits of Miami remain in force—plus the microcephaly it can cause in infants.

And, unfortunately, Aedes aegypti is a hard target. True, it cannot fly very far, meaning that, once a suspect cluster is located, it can be isolated; from a mobility point of view, says Mr Krueger, “It’s the people who are the problem,” especially since Zika is often asymptomatic. But the mosquito lives in crowded places, laying hardy eggs in small bodies of water such as flower pots, bird-baths or the filters of swimming pools: “Pop that sucker open,” says Mr Krueger, “and there’s sometimes aegyptae in there.” Since it prefers people to birds, the chickens are no use; for Zika, “our sentinel system is basically the human being”. Those habits mean that spraying from the air, or from trucks, is not enough.

This fight, he says as a helicopter returns from a mission over the marshes, requires “boots on the ground”; he and his colleagues must go “door-to-door” with hand-held squirters in a pesticidal version of urban warfare. “It’s like a game of cat and mouse out there,” he reckons. Summer is always busy, but Zika has made this one frantic. The Pinellas team recently took almost a month’s worth of calls in a day. The crew is working 14-hour shifts to keep up.

On a call-out at a retirement community in Clearwater, Mr Krueger extracted and examined water from swamps and ponds that had troubled the manageress. He caught a reassuring water spider in the swamp, of a kind that eats mosquito larvae, but patiently explained that the real worry is smaller receptacles such as the crevices in bromeliad plants, which typically need only to be drained. He identified and dispatched aegyptae in six nooks amid the palm trees and Spanish moss. “Aren’t you afraid of getting bitten by a Zika bug?” asked the manageress, confiding that “There’s a lot of panic about Zika.” Every job has its risks, Mr Krueger reasons. His colleagues in the vegetation-management section sometimes wade into alligator-infested channels to clear obstructions that make the water hospitable to mosquitoes.

This sort of appreciation is rare for Florida’s mosquito-busters. As Mr Stuck jokes, if air-conditioning were lost and the mosquitoes given their head, the millions of Americans who have moved to the state would stampede north again. With Zika, at least, Mr Krueger feels he is “assisting with something major that’s happening. That’s kinda cool,” he observes, preparing to test the water in another bird-bath.