Jashandeep Singh: week 2 at vector control

 



Hello everyone! Hope you all are well? Now, I am writing how I spent my week 2 at Suffolk county vector control. Starting with Monday, at first we did ticks identification and I found out lone star ticks the most in my samples. After I did with my tick sampling then I started looking for species of mosquitoes. Thanks to Nicholas who gave us the key book to identify the species of mosquitoes and so me and my interns were looking for species of mosquitoes with the help of key-book. After all this I was then able to identify ticks and mosquitoes species. The next day we went for mosquitoes sampling at Brookhaven and the weather was pretty good, we spent our half of the day sampling and luckily I got three larvae samples. We came back and look under the microscope to identify the species of mosquitoes. Oh god! It took longer time to identify and unfortunately I could not identify it. I took the help from my supervisor who explained me how to identify the mosquitoes species. Now let’s move to next day. On Wednesday, we went to Indian Island for mosquitoes sampling and my experience over there was so terrible as there were many mosquitoes flying and at the top of this the weather was so warm. I took many spots for mosquitoes larvae and marked it under survey app. The place was pretty good but mosquitoes ate me up. After done with our tour, we went back to vector control and started looking out for identifying the species. The identification key book really so helpful and I got the knowledge of different species of mosquitoes. Friday was very interesting day as we went for Tick surveillance at Manorville park. Before reaching there, we sprayed permethrin on our clothes just for the precaution from ticks. Me and my other interns had their own flags and so our supervisor taught us how to take samples. So we took samples from selected area and as such far we just got more population of lone star ticks. After we done with ticks stuff, we came back to the office and started observing under the microscope. This we ended with our week 2 and it was interesting and knowledgeable.

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