Joseph Fiscella: Week 7 at Suffolk County Vector Control

Continuing from last week, this week was also a nice balance of both tick and mosquito field work. On Monday, we visited two of our routine field sites for mosquito larvae: Smith Point and Timber Point. Similar to the other mosquito sites Suffolk County has, these places were part of restoration projects several years ago to improve the conditions on the marsh. A major component of these projects is continuously monitoring the mosquito breeding, which is why we visit these sites frequently. While my supervisor and some of the other interns got a few larvae in their dips, I did not find anything on Monday. Wednesday was a pretty exciting day, since we were heading to a new mosquito site in Brookhaven, NY. This spot was flagged by some of Suffolk County's field workers for having an elevated mosquito presence, so we decided to do some investigating. The photo below shows one of our supervisors, Nick, trying to find a stable path through the phragmites in order to access the marsh. Sure enough, once we started taking samples, I was getting a decent amount of Stage 4 larvae in my dips. While we were there, I noticed that the mosquito larvae would scatter from the surface of the water if my shadow went over them. To combat this, I would identify a hole of water in the distance that I suspected to have larvae, and then I would sneak up on the hole and quickly take a sample before I got too close; the larvae are sensitive to both changes in light and nearby movement. After implementing this approach, I noticed I was getting much more larvae in my dips. After taking these samples back to the lab for identification, we determined they were Aedes sollicitans, the Eastern salt marsh mosquito.

We spent Tuesday and Friday going out for tick sampling. On Friday, we returned to the site in Southhampton. We split up into two groups to work through the grids faster. While my group finished the drags in roughly 45 minutes, my supervisor's group was sampling for nearly two hours just because of how many deer tick larvae they found! While I didn't have any extreme deer tick larvae numbers on Friday, I definitely got a taste of that on Tuesday. The interns and I visited a new site in Laurel Lake, located on the North Fork of Long Island. The sampling definitely took much longer than normal due to the amount of larvae we encountered. We use a thick corduroy fabric to sample ticks from the leaf litter because it is durable against the thorny plants/vines. However, the fabric has thick grooves that make it difficult to get the larvae off, especially with just the lint roller. However, in the interest of time, we stick to the lint roller rather than using tweezers to collect the ticks individually. The most amount of larvae we got from one 30 meter drag was around 120, not an absurd amount for this time of the summer, but it was the most I have ever encountered. Next week, we are taking a break from ticks and mosquitoes while we go back to fish sampling!