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

     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 double-check my identifications before I felt comfortable. It's a great feeling to see all of that practice paying off day-to-day now as we pool our collections together.

    Field work has also pretty much become a locked-in routine. We have our routes and collection sites on a rotation so we all try to space out who has to drive where and everyone knows exactly what needs to be done each morning by now. Our new intern was a very quick learner, which was lovely haha! Even though the routine is familiar, every collection day is a little different depending on the weather, the trap catches, and what species decide to show up, so it's still always interesting to see how mosquito abundance and diversity has been changing throughout the season! It's also fun to see different critter along the routes, like turtles crossing and farm critter running around along the sides of the roads.

    I've really been enjoying this internship and everything it's taught me so far overall. I'm very happy that I've gained a lot more confidence in both my field and laboratory skills while working with my team and it's been a great experience so far, and I'm excited to see what the rest of the summer has in store! :)

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