Rachel Hewey, Week 9

 

    We first made dry ice and set up our light traps and gravid traps on Monday. We also aspirated the resting boxes and sorted through the catches like usual. Something that we did different was take the light out of the light traps to hopefully get less bycatch. On Tuesday, we collected from light traps, gravid traps, and resting boxes. We sorted through each relatively quickly. We noticed that the light traps did not catch nearly as much bycatch or mosquitoes and wondered if this was because of the light or because it stormed badly that night. For this reason, we set up the light traps again on Wednesday without the light to see if we would catch more but we did not. However, on the second day of sampling we found a new species in our light traps called Aedes Trivittatus. This was very exciting for us because a graduate student at a local college has been looking for this species and we are either going to send them there or to our regular lab.

    The only problem we ran into was that the light traps without the light did not catch nearly as many mosquitoes as they usually do. The easy solution to this would be to put the light back in. However, we caught trivittatus for the first time and don’t know if the light has anything to do with this. So, the debate is whether or not we should just catch less mosquitoes all together in order to get more of this species or catch more mosquitoes and bycatch but not as many species. The mosquitoes we usually catch in these traps are not particularly important for the diseases we are trying to find. They are only helpful to take count of the species we have in our area.

    Below is a picture of what a catch from resting boxes typically looks like for us. The reason there are three containers is because we are trying out different types of boxes so see which is the best for catching mosquitoes. We have a group of rectangular plywood boxes, square plywood boxes, and circular collapsible trash bins. We are still working out the logistics of this experiment and are mainly focused on catching as many target species as we can. 


 


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