Week 5 at GCHD


Week 5: Projects in Progress

    Week five didn’t end up being very busy, but I still managed to find some things to do. I spent a lot of time in the field, and noticed that in some places, the tick populations have started dwindling and the summer stretches onward. At this point, I rarely, if ever, find any adult Ixodes ticks, just the occasional male looking for a mate. For the most part, I’ve mainly been coming across nymphs and some larva (though I’ve yet to find any nests), as well as some interesting bugs. 

    When I was in the office, I found time to finalize and edit a lot of the things I’ve been working on so far. The graphic designer and I communicated regularly about the content and style of the infographic we’re working on. While Melinda and I focused on curating the most important content for the limited space, he worked on creating drawings and maximizing the space we had. 

    A challenge I faced when adding finishing touches to the website was finding and taking pictures relevant to each section of the website. The microscope I use to sort ticks by species and life stage also has software built in that allows me to take pictures and upload them to my computer, so I spent some time this week trying to get good quality images of different tick species and life stages. It was a bit of a struggle to obtain good lighting and arrange the ticks properly, but I managed to obtain some decent images using the ticks we had in storage.

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