Isaiah Helmer - Three Weeks with St. Lawrence County Public Health's Mosquito Research Team

Today concludes my third week interning for the St. Lawrence County's Public Health Department at SUNY Potsdam with their Mosquito Research Team! So far, it's been pretty great!

Week one started off with some safety training and precautions before we got into the general project details and background. After all the formalities and verbal trainings during day one, I was taught how to make dry ice with CO2 to use in our traps. After that and gathering all our supplies for a typical day's work, we loaded up our car and headed out to get a tour of our collection sites. Once we returned with our specimens we practiced identifying them underneath microscopes, which took up the rest of our day. I find the identification process the most interesting part, as there's so many specific little things to pay attention to in certain orders all to get to the correct species. The rest of the week proceeded similarly to our first day, except for getting a flat tire on my third day while going out and collecting the traps we set the day before. After we'd return to our lab to spend the rest of the day identifying mosquitos by species.

Week two was spent adjusting to this new routine. Spending the mornings setting and collecting our traps [we use three types total, some more successful than others] was quite nice on most days, the weather hasn't been too hot yet so the morning temps are nice and comfortable when you're not being bothered by the insects flying around. After collection is over, the rest of the day is spent in the lab glued to the microscope while identifying specimens and sorting them into their respective collection dishes. As much as I enjoy being outside and the collection sites are very pretty, I like this part of the day best. I think the whole identification process is so interesting and engaging due to how much detail there is to it!

Week three is when I've been starting to get the hang of things, particularly identification. During the first two weeks, it took me a bit longer than my peers to get through the process. I would have to ask for help often or for someone better than me to double check my work before I felt comfortable turning it over, which is more than okay, but by the end of today, I feel way more confident in my species identification skills than I did two weeks ago. During specimen sorting today, I felt like I went faster than I had days prior and I only had one incorrect ID. I'm very proud of the progress I'm making and the important work I've been to privileged to help out with during these past three weeks with the SLC Public Health Department and SUNY Potsdam's team.

I'm looking forward to continuing work as the summer season begins to roll around now! Things will be getting busier soon!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Yuliia Skrypniuk - Week 10 with DNREC Fish and Wildlife Division

Image
     I can’t believe it’s already the final week of my internship! This week was full of fieldwork, learning, and some exciting last activities with both the tick and mosquito teams.      At the start of the week, I joined the tick team to visit three parks in northern Delaware for flag dragging. While tick numbers were low, we still managed to collect some Ixodes scapularis larvae (commonly known as deer ticks), which are important to track because they can carry Lyme disease.      On Tuesday, I joined the mosquito team for a boat trip out to the salt marshes. We checked water levels, monitored for mosquito larvae, and looked for adult mosquitoes to make sure everything was within acceptable levels. After lunch, we visited two more parks to collect ticks and monitor tick activity there as well.      Wednesday was all about mosquito trap collection. I spent the day with one of the seasonal workers, driving to different trap loc...
Read more

Joseph Fiscella: Week 9 at Suffolk County Vector Control

Image
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 wa...
Read more

Joseph Fiscella: Week 10 at Suffolk County Vector Control

Image
This week was the tenth and final week of my internship at Suffolk County Vector Control, and it truly feels like the summer flew by. On Monday and Tuesday, we wrapped up our vegetation sampling at two additional marsh sites. There was not a huge amount of diversity in the species we found this week compared to last week, but there were some grids this week that contained Phragmites, a tall reed grass commonly found along the edges of the marshes. While the heat and humidity this week did make the vegetation sampling tough work, it was still enjoyable to participate in new methods of population surveillance. Our last outing of the summer was on Thursday. Vector Control was informed of areas in Patchogue, NY that had high mosquito numbers. We had never been to the site before, so it was a bit of investigative work. While we barely found any mosquito larvae in our dips, the sheer number of adult mosquitoes flying around was overwhelming. This, alongside the unevenness of the marsh floor,...
Read more