David Kern - Week 3 - 8 DNREC in Delaware!

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 identification! We did a fun quiz at the end to see how much they knew and they passed with excitement!

This week, we were able to participate in an educational booth to help teach the public about tick safety and identification at the Delaware State Fair. We had a bunch of wallet-sized tick guides, crosswords with parasite vocabulary, and ticks in resin for a good view of what size they are in different life stages. We had a lot of informative conversations and a great time doing so!

 

Our booth at the State Fair! (Bonus Bird Picture!)

Outside of outreach, we have been working with multiple wildlife biologists to collect ticks off of different animals. Recently we helped the State Nongame wildlife biologist, Danielle Minter, collect ectoparasites off of large brown bats during a maternity catch. We have also been collecting ticks off of deceased gray foxes, red foxes, and groundhogs collected by a biologist working to keep predators away from native shorebirds. This week we placed out Sherman traps, and baited them for small mammals. I got the privilege of holding my first mouse that had no ticks on it.

Huge tick found on Fox!

The mouse that we caught!

Bat that was caught (and handled professionally) and a bat bug!

Outside of our normal tick research we got to go bug catching with Dr. Bartlett from the University of Delaware, looked at some pretty cool soft-ticks from Egypt (Ornithodoros savignyi), and I got to see one of my favourite animals at one of our sites for tick dragging! So far a pretty amazing internship and I am so excited for the rest of it!

Some Bonus photos of the soft ticks, a rat snake, our tick resins, and some pinned insects!