Defne Gumus - Blog #1 (Week 8)

 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 majority of my time doing!

In this first blog post I will go over the mosquito trap aspect of the internship. Every week my team (myself and 2 other summer interns) were in charge of setting 15 mosquito traps. Typically, we have 13 gravid traps and 2 BG-Sentinel traps to set in different areas of Philadelphia. 

Gravid traps include a bin, a toolbox (containing a motor assembly and fan), a 6V battery, and a plastic collection chamber with a pipe allowing it capture the mosquitos. In order to set a gravid trap you must fill the bin with what our office calls "stink water," which is a mixture of water, grass, and a bacteria powder. You must place the collection chamber and battery inside the toolbox, connect the wires, make sure the fan is on. It is best to set a gravid trap in flat, shady areas with denser vegetation. Gravid traps are collected within 24 hours of setting, where at the time of collection a paper that has the location, time, date, and estimate of mosquitos is dropped inside the collection chamber to later recall and write down (will get into this more thoroughly in a future blog!)

To discuss a bit of the weekly schedule, we usually set around 6 gravid and 2 BG traps on Mondays. Then, on Tuesday, we collect the 8 we had set the previous day, and aim to set another 6-7 gravid traps, completing the weekly collections by Wednesday. However, sometimes setting our last one or two gravid gets pushed to Wednesday, which is fine! We have built this schedule in order to ease the end of the week so that we have ample time to collect our dips.

PS: One MUST during the setting and collection of the gravid traps is gloves.. that stink water will get to you if you are not careful!

PPS: Be extra careful when retrieving a gravid trap you have set at a cemetery as ear wigs love to chill inside the handles and bin.

Till next time, 

Defne! 

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 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

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