NEVBD-TEC Summer Internship Program

 During my seventh and eighth week at the Suffolk County Arthropod Borne Disease Laboratory, I worked all around Long Island going to different county parks to collect ticks for state evaluation and testing. I have had amazing experiences traveling to different parks, I found it very interesting that some sites on different parts of the island would have different numbers of each species. I also got familiar with recognizing larval ticks, rabbit ticks, and Asian Longhorned ticks. I spent much of my time at the microscope, which I found to be my favorite part of the job. I feel fully confident in my ability to ID ticks without the use of a microscope, but if I am ever confused my colleagues are always there to help me. I also advanced my research on tick expansion into the northeast due to climate change, with a focus on northeastern areas and public health implications. I also analyzed 2026 email data to track the increase in Lone Star tick abundance, and performed more research on...

This internship has been an absolute blast so far! Since starting this internship I have grown very fascinated about ticks and not only how to control them, but what can be done to help the general public feel safer as well. Over the course of the last few weeks, we have been to multiple outreach events, ranging from five years old's in a 4-H camp to anyone at the Delaware State Fair.  While participating in outreach for younger kids, we developed a ‘Tick Bagel’ that was covered in poppy seeds and ticks to show their size comparison. The activity worked as a fun eye-spy game for kids to help get them interested in what a tick looked like, and how to identify them. We also played a fun tag game where some kids could act as a tick and others would be host animals. This allowed them to understand host-parasite relationships, and how some ticks prefer different species over others. Overall, they seemed to enjoy it and many had already known quite a bit about tick safety and identificat...

 Hi everyone! A little introduction about myself: My name is Defne Gumus and I am a rising senior at Bucknell University. I study biology on the pre-med track (and am also doing a theatre minor)! For the past 8 weeks I have spent my summer NEVBD internship with Vector Control Services at the Department of Public Health in Philadelphia. It has been an insanely insightful past 2 months and I never knew working with mosquitos could have taught me this much about field work, data collection, or working well with a team! I feel I could best explain the duties of the internship in three different categories. First, is the setting of mosquito traps (whether it be gravid or BG-sentinel), second is dipping for larval mosquito, and third is the laboratory work. I learned so much beyond these three general avenues, including how to do bacterial larvicides, handling complaints, community outreach, and even tick collection, but for the purposes of these blogs I will talk about what I spent the ...

 Weeks 3 & 4: These past two weeks I have gotten a lot of experience collecting ticks. When going out to the core sites I have gotten more comfortable being able to point out the different nymphs, the blacklegged nymphs were harder to point out but I feel like I got the hang of them now! I am still continuing to read literature to decide on a project, I have been reading a lot about climate and its impact on tick population, but I will see what I write my project on. I have also been able to sort ticks from other core sites. I’ve been really enjoying looking through and seeing the types of ticks that we find and visualize even further the tick populations present on Long Island. One of my favorite things we have done in the past week was attend a council regarding ticks. At this meeting there are all different types of people from entomologist to doctors to directors of businesses regarding tick control. This experience was very cool as I got to see how people from all fields w...

The summer has been flying by, and it's hard to believe I'm already past the halfway point of my internship! I've enjoyed strengthening my mosquito identification skills and observing how the diversity of mosquito species shifts across the season here in upstate NY. As the summer weather has heated up, we've been collecting a noticeably greater number and variety of mosquitoes. Busier traps mean longer sorting sessions and many more species to learn, but they've also helped me become faster and more confident at sorting!  One of my new favorite species to spot has been Aedes japonicus , an invasive mosquito with a distinctive pattern of white banding on its legs and silver patches on its abdomen. The bold black-and-white pattern stands out immediately under the microscope and makes the species easy to identify. I've included a photo below! While most of my time has been spent on mosquito surveillance (trapping, sorting, and identifying), we've also set aside...

  Hello fellow interns and supervisors! I am a rising Junior at St. John’s University pursuing a bachelors in biology. I couldn’t be more grateful to be afforded this opportunity through the NEVBD-TEC Summer Internship Program and look forward to sharing my experience with this side of research! One of the first things that came from this internship was an acute consciousness of weather patterns and natural cycles, as they’ve been much more involved in deciding the kind of days I have. I hadn’t realized how regulated and indoors my life was until my day to day tasks depended on being outside longer than a 10 minute walk from transportation to destination. Working with the tides, the insects, the sky, you really just have to go with the flow nature dictates day by day.   Our job as a unit is to maintain a stable control over the vectors and habitats within our county to ensure public and environmental health and safety. We surveil our areas, input the data, and devise a plan to...

       The first four weeks of my internship have introduced me to many different aspects of vector surveillance and shown me that every day in the field is different. Coming into the internship, I expected to spend most of my time collecting mosquitoes, but I quickly learned that the work involves much more than that. Between mosquito surveillance, tick sampling, and other field activities, I've been able to experience several sides of Suffolk County's vector control program.      Much of my first few weeks was spent assisting with mosquito surveillance. One thing that surprised me was how few mosquito larvae we were finding. Before starting, I assumed we would see large numbers at almost every site, but that wasn't the case. It made me realize how much weather and environmental conditions influence mosquito development and why consistent surveillance is necessary, even when populations appear low. Every trip into the field contributes to a better un...

While on the field, my supervisor taught me and the other interns how to differentiate mosquito larvae from a glance before taking a closer look. We took dips of various bodies of stagnant water, things such as tires, water basins, plastic bins, garbage left standing upright, and puddles of varying sizes.  Every week we took 10 dips all around the city to send it to a lab so that there would be a record of what types of mosquitos were prevalent in specific areas.  From a distance, if there are many mosquito larvae they may look like small dots in the water, and upon closer inspection we found that larvae spasm as they move and look like (in my opinion) sharp and prickly worm-like insects.  By just looking at the mosquitos in their larval stage, we were able to venture a guess as to what the species of mosquito was and what it would look like if it were to hatch into an adult. Some presented light brown or yellow colorings, some were a darker brown or almost black color. (...

 I just finished my sixth week at the Vermont Agency of Agriculture! Time has flown by, and I can't believe I only have a month left. In the past few weeks, I have been administering the Aedes Albopictus surveillance efforts through fieldwork every Tuesday and Wednesday. During my fieldwork, I am refilling and taking samples back from OVI-position and BG-GAT traps. On the other days (Mondays, Thursdays, and Fridays), I am usually doing mosquito identification and organizing mosquitoes from other traps, as well as counting eggs and mosquitoes from the traps that I set up. I have also been using computer programs to track and digitize data from the Aedes Albopictus traps. In the past few weeks, mosquito numbers have definitely started to pick up, which is something we have been monitoring and is interesting to see as I compare egg and adult mosquito numbers to previous weeks and previous years. It has been such a great experience so far, and I have already learned and grown so much t...

Here's my update on Weeks 4–6 working at the Virginia Department of Health under the supervision of the Epidemiology team! Week 4: Now that I have gotten the hang of conducting tick drags and have completed multiple drags on my own at the site I selected, I had the amazing opportunity to conduct a drag with the local health department's Epidemiology lead for the county where my site is located. The experience was incredibly informative because I was able to learn more about the relationship between the VDH and local health departments, as well as how responsibilities are divided between the two. Week 5: While I have continued conducting tick drags, my mentor also set up informational sessions to teach us how to organize our data using R so our findings are easier to visualize and analyze. We also had the opportunity to meet with the Epidemiology and Laboratory Capacity for Prevention and Control of Emerging Infectious Diseases (ELC) grant team to learn more about the grants t...

      Roughly four weeks have passed since my last post here! Most of them have gone by relatively quick and smoothly!     Our routine hasn't changed much besides the fact that our team has one new intern now, which is exciting! :D My day is still pretty evenly split in half, with my mornings being spent outside at out collection sites checking and bringing in the CDC, gravid, and DRB traps, and my afternoons looking under the microscope in the lab to identify the mosquitos we collect down to their exact species with very careful practice. I've gotten very confident in my identification skills, having to use our dichotomous key very little at this point with specific species! I get really zoned in during the process and it honestly clears my mind and I find it all quite relaxing! It's been really rewarding looking back and seeing how much I've improved since my first few weeks with the team. At the beginning of the internship, I had to often ask someone to doubl...

 The first trimester of my internship at Garrett County Health Department: Environmental Services has been very exciting and extremely insightful. On my first day I went to help give presentation to elementary school classes and learned how to sample. After that it was off to the races, going out every day and collecting ticks for testing. There were plenty of cool things to see that weren't just ticks as well, spiders, moths, butterflies, and a bunch of other bugs. With probably the coolest I found was a state endangered Baltimore Checkerspot. Which was a really, really cool sight to see. That being said that doesn't mean I was diverting time from finding ticks as well. With the two typical ticks for me to find being Ixodes scapularis and Dermacentor variabilis , those unfortunately weren't the only two species I found in the area. I had also found invasive Haemaphysalis longicornis (Asian long-horned tick)   and more notably Amblyomma americanum  (the lone star tick). U...

I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I’ve officially finished the first half of my internship with DNREC! The past few weeks have been packed with traveling across Delaware, collecting ticks, and identifying tick species. We even had an "arts and crafts" day where we made a tick bagel (an everything bagel with a few hidden ticks) and created resin ticks for outreach events to help show people just how tiny ticks really are.                                                         A photo of my team and me working on the resin ticks!        An example of our resin ticks!  I also spent time working with the mosquito crew, taking the Argo out into the marsh for mosquito surveillance and helping set up light traps. Over the course of one day, we visited fourteen different sites to place mosquito traps for...