NEVBD-TEC Summer Internship Program

Today concludes my third week interning for the St. Lawrence County's Public Health Department at SUNY Potsdam with their Mosquito Research Team! So far, it's been pretty great! Week one started off with some safety training and precautions before we got into the general project details and background. After all the formalities and verbal trainings during day one, I was taught how to make dry ice with CO2 to use in our traps. After that and gathering all our supplies for a typical day's work, we loaded up our car and headed out to get a tour of our collection sites. Once we returned with our specimens we practiced identifying them underneath microscopes, which took up the rest of our day. I find the identification process the most interesting part, as there's so many specific little things to pay attention to in certain orders all to get to the correct species. The rest of the week proceeded similarly to our first day, except for getting a flat tire on my third day whil...

 In my first week at the Arthropod Borne Disease Laboratory (ABDL) in Suffolk County NY, I spent time getting used to the new workplace environment, setting up my email, and starting work on my computer. After I completed some mandatory trainings, | looked at both tick and mosquito samples under a microscope to start identifying the different species. In the first week I learned quite a bit about mosquitos and ticks from my colleagues, and from doing research and reading articles online. Once I had a foundation in tick and tick-borne diseases, I started researching topics that interested me to look into. I originally planned to research tick-borne disease Ehrlichiosis but ultimately settled on a different topic fro my project. During the first week I was also able to go out into the field to collect ticks with my colleagues and get practice identifying ticks in real time, and with specimen collection. ABDL Workspace In my second week at the ABDL, I attended a tick symposium at Ston...

Hello! My name is David Kern and I am starting June 8th with the Delaware Department of Natural Resources working studying tick and mosquitos! I am a rising junior at the University of Delaware double majoring in Entomology and Wildlife Conservation and Ecology! I am so excited to be a part of this awesome team and to learn as much as I can!

The first two weeks here at the Arthropod-Borne Disease Laboratory with Suffolk County Department of Health Services have been very exciting! In the first week, we toured the lab and met entomologists, fellows, and others we will be working with this summer. I was able to learn a lot about the different tick species, the 4 of which are of medical importance here on Long Island. We even got to look at different mosquito species under the microscope as an aid to our training. Later in our first week, we got to go out into one of the lab’s core sites, a county park near the lab, where we got to collect ticks through a tick flagging method. Although difficult at first to spot the nymphs, I felt I got used to them after a while. It was very exciting to be out in the field; it was something I had never gotten to do before! After going out into the field, we spent some time sorting ticks from another site, and we got to see the different tick species of Amblyomma americanum, Ixodes scapularis...

This week was the tenth and final week of my internship at Suffolk County Vector Control, and it truly feels like the summer flew by. On Monday and Tuesday, we wrapped up our vegetation sampling at two additional marsh sites. There was not a huge amount of diversity in the species we found this week compared to last week, but there were some grids this week that contained Phragmites, a tall reed grass commonly found along the edges of the marshes. While the heat and humidity this week did make the vegetation sampling tough work, it was still enjoyable to participate in new methods of population surveillance. Our last outing of the summer was on Thursday. Vector Control was informed of areas in Patchogue, NY that had high mosquito numbers. We had never been to the site before, so it was a bit of investigative work. While we barely found any mosquito larvae in our dips, the sheer number of adult mosquitoes flying around was overwhelming. This, alongside the unevenness of the marsh floor,...

This week marked our final week of tick sampling. The interns and I went to all three of our tick sites on Monday, Tuesday, and Friday for one last round of sampling for the season. As expected, the number of tick larvae was considerably high, but this was not a surprise since we have been collecting a lot of larvae for the past several weeks. To review, the two ticks that we find the most at our grids are the deer tick ( Ixodes scapularis ) and the lonestar tick (Amblyomma americanum ). However, I came across something fascinating on Tuesday after we took the samples back to the lab in order to confirm the tick counts. When I put some of the tick rolls under the microscope, I noticed that some of the larvae were shaped like the deer tick but had a slightly lighter coloration and less prominent mouth pieces (palpi). I called over one of my supervisors, Moses, for assistance. He determined that the tick was of the genus Ixodes , but it was definitely not a deer tick. The microscope I wa...