Week 5

 This past week was my fifth week conducting mosquito surveillance. This week was a bit different than usual because my group had a training session in a different county. We set the traps out like normal on Monday and collected the mosquitoes on Tuesday. We tried to sort as much as possible before we had to leave for training on Wednesday. The training lasted two days and was very inciteful.  These instructors had much more experience with mosquitoes than all of my group and did a good job giving us better ways to capture and sort throughout a week. 

On Wednesday, we practiced identifying mosquitoes, and the instructors gave us a key they made themselves from the use of multiple other keys. We have been using a key for all of North America and as you can imagine that is very broad and confusing. They also showed us some species that we have never identified before which was nice because we are more informed on what we could be seeing. 

On Thursday, we talked about a normal week for their group and how they get everything done. Some new things that we are going to do from now on are to make sure we identify the mosquitoes when they are fresh and not to freeze them until we have pooled that specific batch. We were also told to identify the mosquitoes without using a microscope as best as possible, then to confirm our work with the microscope. Both of these methods will be very useful in order to keep the mosquitoes in good condition and to save as much time as possible. 

Finally, on Friday I attended the first seminar of the summer! I enjoyed hearing about the research being conducted in Connecticut because it sounded very similar to what I am doing here. Hearing about Dr. Armstrong's background was also very interesting because he did not know in college that he wanted to study vector-borne diseases. 

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