The story behind the invention.
Blair Dancy has taken on giants all his life. But now, he is taking on the tiniest of our neighbors.
"I've gone from Goliaths to mosquitoes," he says.
Growing up in Houston, he contended with his older twin brothers. Today at forty years old, they are still taller and bigger than he is.
In 5A Texas high school football, he played defensive line and took on the offensive lineman, the biggest players on the field. As a trial lawyer, he tries lawsuits representing, and against, some of the largest companies in America.
Despite being six-foot, three-inches tall, Blair still considers himself to be "the little guy."
"Growing up with larger twin brothers in the house makes one think a lot more about how to win a fight. Sometimes, the best way to win is not to take them on directly, but to think of better ways to get the end result you want."
After getting his undergraduate degree from the University of Texas, Blair spent a year in Japan teaching English. The cultural shift was challenging at first, but that was what Blair wanted. "I was looking to go overseas for the first time, and I wanted to go to the place that was as different from America as I could imagine. Japan definitely fit that bill, and I grew to love it."
After Japan, Blair and Allison, now his wife, traveled back the long way, spending half a year exploring east Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.
On their return, Blair knew that he wanted to make a difference, and the law appeared to offer the best opportunity to do that. School had shown math and science to be Blair's strengths, and a private counselor had once tested Blair for career paths and determined that the one career that was definitely not a fit was the law.
"The problem is," Blair confesses, "I really can't back down from a challenge like that. I had to pursue it."
Sure enough, Blair graduated from the University of Texas Law School, with honors, and landed a prestigious job with a large Texas firm in Austin. He left the big firm and is now with a mid-size firm that specializes in commercial trial work, an area where he finds the most rewards.
More recently, he has changed direction, focusing on the tiniest of opponents: the Asian Tiger mosquito.
As the father of two boys, Blair thought living on a creek in central Austin naturally came with a mosquito problem. "But these were nothing like what I remembered in Houston. They were highly aggressive and sometimes came in swarms. It was just awful. I knew something was different. I just didn't know what was different."
He was right. Blair cleared a small forest of invasive bamboo, standing between his house and Shoal Creek. One day, he found he could reach the creek.
"I thought I would dare to walk down there, thinking the mosquitoes might try to carry me off. But they didn't."
To his surprise, there were no mosquitoes in the creek, despite there being standing water. After some research, he found that his neighborhood had been infested by the Asian Tiger mosquito. The Asian Tiger entered the U.S. through Houston's ports in 1985 in a shipment of scrap tires. The pest—called one of the 100 worst invasive species in the world—has since been seen as far north as Chicago and set up shop in every hospitable climate east of the Rockies. So far, efforts have been successful on the west side of the Rockies to keep the Asian Tiger out.
This discovery set off a new challenge for Blair—how to solve the mosquito problem for himself. His neighbors bought one of the CO2 gas traps, but it did not help. Blair began to research what solutions were out there, and then researched why they were not helping the problem in his own yard.
The bottom line: There is no single silver bullet for mosquitoes.
"After World War II, the Rockefeller foundation led an effort to kill off a species of mosquito on Italy's island of Sardinia using DDT. The mosquito was transmitting malaria, and the thinking at the time was that species eradication on a self-contained island like that was possible. It really wasn't."
The mosquito species not only survived but became DDT resistant. The focus soon changed to the eradication of malaria itself, instead of the mosquito species.
"The lesson of Sardinia, at least for me, is that you have to pick your battles," Blair says. "Find a way to win with a difficult opponent. I've been doing that all my life."
The other lesson from Sardinia is the unknown long-term effects of a chemical on people and the environment.
"If we are studying the effects of DDT in Sardinia fifty years later, what does that mean for the other chemicals we use to fight mosquitoes? For some of them, the answer is simply that we don't know. For our yard, we wanted something as environmentally friendly as possible."
That's the inspiration behind Blair inventing a new mosquito trap. It does not use chemicals, green-house gases, or electricity. It only requires water and a few leaves from the yard. It also does not aspire to completely rid a yard of all mosquitoes.
"It's another weapon in my mosquito arsenal. Instead of fighting the biting mosquitoes head on, like most of the traps on the market, I thought the better way was to get them before they became adults."
After a few years of research and experimentation, the Mosquito Swallow was born.
"It helps the little guy," Blair says. "That used to be me. But now it's my kids. I really invented it for them."
Mosquito Swallow LLC, a Texas limited liability company.
Mailing address:
Mosquito Swallow LLC
PMB 190
5501-A Balcones Drive
Austin, TX 78731
Email: info@MosquitoSwallow.com
Phone: 512-923-TRAP (8727)
Officers:
Blair Dancy - Operations and General Counsel
Blair obtained his B.A. from the University of Texas in 1991, and his J.D. with honors from the University of Texas School of Law in 1997. As a commercial trial lawyer, Blair has brought the analytical skills of the court room to operations and organization of Mosquito Swallow LLC. Born and raised in Houston, Blair remembers what it was like before the Asian Tiger spread across the U.S. Blair is the inventor of the trap.
Allison Dancy - Marketing and Sales
Allison earned her B.S. in marketing and international studies from Iowa State in 1990. She has over ten years experience in marketing and sales working for companies such as Dell, IBM, Lotus, and Vignette.
