Rockies and High Plains Vector-borne Diseases Center Summer Internship

 Hi again! In this post, I want to talk about my experiences with egg collection during the summer. Thad, who you may know from the blog, collects wild egg rafts every week for his project, and I went with him once. He set up the "stinky water" (alfalfa water) traps the day before, and we went to the locations to collect them. Here is what they looked like: We looked for egg rafts, picked them up with a spoon, and put each in a separate container with water: When they hatch, having only one egg raft per container makes species identification easier. I used what I learned to collect mosquitoes from Logan, UT, and test them for resistance to LSPH. Alfalfa water that I fermented in my backyard One of the traps I set I got 13 egg rafts in Logan but forgot to take a picture. It was good to get more experience with field work.  

 Hi everyone! A few weeks ago, I went to SLCMAD and learned how to conduct virus testing in mosquitoes. They test for West Nile Virus and Saint Louis encephalitis using a qPCR method called TaqMan, which only measures the amplification of a specific sequence. Here's a picture of me learning how to use their very fancy multichannel micropipettes:  They also have an automated purification system to conduct the DNA extractions: They use 2 separate hoods to avoid contamination:  We only tested a few samples and none of them were positive for either virus. It was a very interesting experience and I got to use some equipment for the first time. 

Hi all! The past few weeks have been focused on getting acquainted with R Shiny Apps and building the Wyoming Tick Dashboard using the program. While there have been some quirks and definitely a learning curve, I have found that it's been a really interesting challenge. I have been researching scientific communication techniques when it comes to vector borne disease (specifically ticks) to inform how the information is presented to have the greatest impact. I have also spent a lot of time reviewing other state and organization's mosquito and tick dashboards to gain inspiration. While there is still a lot of work to go, I am proud of the rough draft that I have created.  -Jaea 

 Hello again, everyone! There are not too many updates this time. We received new traps but quickly realized they were not very effective. We then began experiments to determine which was our most effective Gravid trap. Other than that, at most of our sites, our traps seem to be catching many more mosquitoes, which is expected since August is prime mosquito season. That's pretty much it! So to compensate for the short post, I decided to share a few more photos. Thanks for reading! 

      I am nearing the end of the insecticide resistance surveillance project that my partner Fernando and I have been working on. It has been really cool to see the process go full circle and to have moved through the entire process myself. I had six sites I collected from, where I was able to sort out a sufficient number of Culex Tarsalis to bioassay with sufficient replicate numbers. I caught the mosquitoes, sorted them, performed bottle assays, froze them, extracted their DNA, and then qPCR'd them. While I initially thought I might find heterozygote genotypes for a kdr mutation because a number of the mosquitoes were recovering after being knocked down, the qPCR results showed that 99% of the mosquitoes caught were homozygotes for the wild-type allele that is susceptible to the insecticide permethrin.      I spoke to my Karla (my PI) about this and she said that the behavior of the Culex Tarsalis, and their ability to recover, but the lack of kdr mutati...

Hi everyone! Today I want to talk about a bioassay I conducted to determine if one of our colonies was still resistant to Lsph. First, I  prepared a 10,000 ppm  Lsph  stock, then made  serial dilutions to create concentrations of 1,000, 100, 10, and 1 ppm. Then I used these stocks to create cups of concentrations 0.005, 0.05, 0.5, 5, 50, and 500 ppm. I made 3 replicates of each concentration. In each cup, I placed 25 2nd-instar larvae and added some food. This is what the cups look like; the one on the left is the control (no Lsph ), and the one on the right is the highest concentration: This is what the setup looks like: I checked the cups every 12 hours, counted the survivors, and collected the dead larvae in ethanol. At 48 hours, I ended the experiment and also collected the survivors in ethanol. After analyzing the obtained data, we concluded the colony was still highly resistant to Lsph. The resistant and susceptible samples in ethanol were stored in a -80 °C fr...

 Hi everyone! I just got access to post so this will be a bit of a longer introduction and update on the past weeks' adventures.  I am currently an undergraduate at Oregon State University studying public health with a minor in statistics and a certificate in GIS. I was originally connected to Colorado State University and RaHP Vec last summer when I supported field work a PhD student in the Center for Vector-Borne Infectious Disease (CVID) was completing. This summer I am working at Teton County Weed & Pest, focusing on tick and mosquito surveillance and lab work.  So far I have had the opportunity to complete tick survey's in the area and I must say there is no better feeling then returning from field work with a jar of ticks.  Part of my time at TCWP will be working on using R Shiny to build a tick surveillance dashboard for the county. I'm looking forward to the opportunity to make the data accessible to the public and hopefully help educate on common tick mi...