Rachel Hewey: Week 7

 

This Monday we set up all our traps like normal but then drove to a new area to look at another potential site. On Tuesday, we collected from the light traps and resting boxes and sorted through everything. This was a big accomplishment for us since we have never finished sorting that fast. On Wednesday, we collected from resting boxes again and sorted quickly through those and discussed purchasing materials for making more resting boxes. The reason we want more resting boxes is because we have only caught blood fed culiseta in that type of trap so far. Thursday and Friday we sent assembling the resting boxes and the professor I work with had to drive the pooled mosquitoes down to the lab for testing.

One problem we have had this week is figuring out how to ship our pools to the lab. No shipping company in the area will take the pools because they must be shipped with dry ice. So far, we have had to drive the pools down twice, but we will not be able to do this anymore and we are hoping the Dept. of Health will help us with this problem.

Even though this week was routine for me I still learned how to assemble the resting boxes. We had to use a circular saw to cut the plywood and a drill to screw everything together. This was not very hard to learn, I just had never used a saw before. A graduate student from ESF also came up on Wednesday to help us correctly distinguish culex pipiens from restuans. He had noticed that no key that has been published is reliable enough for distinguishing between the two, so he made his own and wanted us to test it out. I thought this was very interesting to see the differences that he had observed throughout his research.

Below is a picture of one of the other interns aspirating the resting boxes at our site. The backpack she is carrying holds the 6-volt battery we use to power the vacuum. We use a plastic catch container with a mesh bottom to hold the mosquitoes. This homemade contraption works very well for capturing the mosquitoes and keeping them in good condition for identifying. 




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