Joseph Fiscella: Week 9 at Suffolk County Vector Control

This week marked our final week of tick sampling. The interns and I went to all three of our tick sites on Monday, Tuesday, and Friday for one last round of sampling for the season. As expected, the number of tick larvae was considerably high, but this was not a surprise since we have been collecting a lot of larvae for the past several weeks. To review, the two ticks that we find the most at our grids are the deer tick (Ixodes scapularis) and the lonestar tick (Amblyomma americanum). However, I came across something fascinating on Tuesday after we took the samples back to the lab in order to confirm the tick counts. When I put some of the tick rolls under the microscope, I noticed that some of the larvae were shaped like the deer tick but had a slightly lighter coloration and less prominent mouth pieces (palpi). I called over one of my supervisors, Moses, for assistance. He determined that the tick was of the genus Ixodes, but it was definitely not a deer tick. The microscope I was using did not have a powerful enough magnification to be able to discern grooves on the mouthpieces, which would allow us to determine what species the tick belonged to. I then picked these ticks off the lint roller and put them in vials to be frozen or preserved in 70% ethanol. I am excited to learn what species these ticks end up being!

On Wednesday and Thursday, we conducted vegetation sampling at the same marsh sites that we go to for mosquito larvae. We are trying to get a sense of which species are present at regular intervals on the marsh, especially since these sites were subject to extensive restoration projects. The spots on the marsh where we check the vegetation are indicated by a small wooden post. We use a meter stick and five dowels to create the sampling grid. Each dowel has 10 evenly spaced markings. For each of the 50 markings on the dowels, we take a metal rod and line it up next to the marking and slide it to the ground. We record any plant species that is touching the metal rod. The most common plant that we find is Spartina alternaflora, a salt marsh cordgrass with thick shoots. Spartina patens is also a fairly common grass, and it's easy to distinguish based on its thin texture and white, wispy flowers. My favorite type of plant we encounter is Salicornia depressa, a glasswort that has patches of both green and red due to different colored chlorophylls. Overall, it was nice explore the marshes in a different way this week, and I'm looking forward to completing the vegetation sampling next week.