Rockies and High Plains Vector-borne Diseases Center Summer Internship

 Hey all, sorry I haven't been super up to date on my blog posts it's been crazy over here. These last couple of weeks we have started getting ready to do our Buffalo Turbine treatment spraying which has involved a lot of prep. For reference, the Buffalo Turbine is a sprayer which will spray a treatment in neighborhoods over people's houses. This treatment is not a chemical pesticide but instead is a bacterial larvacide. It contains a larva which will specifically target and kill larvae while remaining harmless to other organisms.  As a result we have had to start trapping a few new sites in order to collect baseline data for the spraying. This has been a bit difficult to manage with still having our normal trapping route and IDing but it's been manageable. We also had to pass out letters giving information on the treatment to every resident in the treatment zones which was definitely a lot, but very important.  We also grew some mosquito larvae! We grew these to send o...

 These first few weeks have been very busy getting everyone settled in at CVID. I am lucky enough to continue working at my normal lab with my normal group while also inducting some new interns in this summer. Starting off the first week slow by reviewing the training on bottle assay protocols using some of our lab-reared mosquitoes, by the next week we were ready to trap!  This summer, the wild caught mosquitoes are my first experiences with mosquito species other than Aedes aegypti. We pulled out all of the big books and the big fancy microscope to start IDing our mosquitoes and I loved it. The main two mosquitoes,  Culex tarsalis and Aedes Vexens,  prove easy enough to tell apart but it always fun to find one that isn’t either of those so you have to pull out the big guns. I never thought I would spend 20 minutes looking at one mosquito let alone looking so closely at their butts, but here I am. As a lab, we participate participated in an MIP outreach event with h...

Hello everyone, these last couple weeks have kept us busy in Delta. I have learned more and more about mosquito's every week! More specifically, I have learned how to correctly identify the mosquitos that we capture. This took some practice at first but it became surprisingly easy over time. Here in Delta County, we are primarily searching for Culex tarsalis due to their ability to spread West Nile Virus. Luckily, these Culex tarsalis have a very prominent white band on their proboscis that makes them very easy to identify. Although we have had some pools of Tarsalis we have not had any positive for West Nile.  This was a cool photo of a Culex Tarsalis we took here in Delta County. Additionally, once a week I have been able to go out with the mosquito control district to see everything they do to control the local mosquito population. I have been able to see how BTI (Bacillus Thuringiensis Istaelensis) is being used to eliminate larva in standing water. This BTI comes in forms of g...

 Hello! A few weeks ago, someone asked me how I could study mosquitoes in Laramie since there was none. As of today I can confirm that they are very very wrong, because if they're right then I don't know what I've spent my days counting.  I have been working with the City of Laramie mosquito crew for about a week and a half now. The team has been incredibly welcoming and it's been really fun to learn how to run their trapping lines. The traps used are composed of a CO2 tank, a mesh sort of net, a light, and batteries to run it. Honestly, it looks like a little beekeeper outfit hanging in a tree. In general, it is a fairly simple trap that lures mosquitoes in and keep them there over night.  Each morning, we follow the trapping lines (there are two that we follow, one with 5 pounds CO2 tanks and a line of 20 pounders) and collect the mosquitoes from the night before and unset the traps. We return with the mosquitoes to freeze them for about an hour or more and identify/c...

 Hello once again everybody! This is definitely the next blog post after Week 3, so it is 'Week 4'. That is how we're going to handle it. Work is anticipated to continue increasing in pace as we get more mosquitos. It rained pretty good these last few weeks, and it's looking like it'll rain tomorrow. Our historic route trapping is proceeding as usual but bug numbers are up! I found a bunch more fun bugs for my 'to pin' collection, and actually when I'm done with this I really ought to pin a bug or two. Work hours stop but bugs never stop!! Otherwise, we did our first Buffalo Turbine trapping run! Some kinks to work out, but coordinating multiple people prepping fieldwork is inevitably going to have some issues. I have collected traps from the South Valley sites, and tomorrow will collect the NE Heights, but I have not done setup yet. I've only got a week to estimate, but generally we have a few Aedes aegypti per trap with some houses having a ton! T...

       The peak of tick abundance has come and passed this year. Now that the temperatures are averaging in the 80s/90s ℉ in northern Colorado it will be much harder to find ticks, so active tick surveillance has ended. We still have a passive tick station where the general public is able to fill out surveys and deposit any ticks that they may find on themselves during their hikes. This station is checked on a weekly basis, collecting any surveys and ticks, as well as refilling with surveys and tick removal kits. On another note, because we have stopped actively collecting ticks we are now combing through our data recorded from active surveillance. We're hoping to find some relationship between ticks, vegetation preference, soil temp/moisture, and other environmental factors. I'm also writing a methods for our procedure on marking ticks for our capture and release experiment, as well as going over other peer-reviewed papers that have conducted similar experiments to ...

     Within the first couple weeks of starting RaHP VEC, I have begun learning about mosquitoes and all that is involved when working with them. Since this summer is my first experience with mosquito work, I spent my first week learning about mosquito care with the lab-kept Culex tarsalis colony. While working with the colony, I learned more about the mosquito life cycle. Additionally, I had the opportunity to practice a dissection to help me learn more about mosquito anatomy.       In addition to normal mosquito care tasks, I also worked with fellow RaHP VEC interns, Olivia, Isabelle and Grace. Early in the week, I set mosquito traps with Olivia and Isabelle at the Environmental Learning Center. I did not previously know how the process of trapping mosquitoes worked, and I ended up being fascinated by the entire contraption. The four of us also attended an outreach event at CSU’s main campus to help teach high schoolers more about mosquitoes and m...

This week I began actually trapping mosquitoes. It became incredibly obvious that mosquito season is finally starting when looking at the data from this week compared to last week. Our data jumped up from just catching about a few hundred last week to >10,000 this week! I’m really interested to compare next week to this week to see if there's a drop off or continued growth. The data from this week is also significantly higher than the historical data. Almost X3 more mosquitoes than this time last year. The Culex % is also about X4 higher than last year. 2023 was historically a bad West  Nile year all over Colorado, and while our overall mosquito numbers are still less than 2023, the Culex % is much higher. This is probably a good indicator that this is going to be a busy summer. I'm also getting to set some more traps in some of the more rural communities in Weld county! Not only will we be able to provide surveillance for towns that currently don't do any, I'm getti...

  Hi all! It's been a blast reading everyone's experiences over the past few weeks. Last week, Sabrina and I finished up our second week of mosquito trapping for West Nile Virus surveillance in Jefferson County, CO (Photo of Sabrina at one of the traps below). We're currently trapping at 5 sites, but will add 1-2 more sites in the coming weeks. This past week we got to experience all the ups and downs of field work - a couple balmy days, some torrential downpour and thunderstorms, and 100 degree weather to round out the week. The rain on our trapping days made our mosquito yield a bit lower than anticipated, but that gave us more time to really hone our mosquito identification skills. As someone who has never worked with mosquitoes before, I'm grateful for the extra time to get through the learning curve. I've also been tackling going through Jefferson County's historic surveillance data dating back to 2003. The goal is to get all this data organized and uploade...

 This week was spent exploring the many nefarious holes presented by having extremely temperamental river (the Animas), and the possible habitat implicated by them. It was rugged terrain in many places, not easy to traverse. It was safe to say that carting around a blower was not an option, so we were reliant upon tossing G30 by hand. This presented its own set of challenges, namely in coverage and range. However, the farther along the riverside we pushed the more evident it became how necessary the push was. Upon flooding, the river rises above the customary riverbank and subs into the surrounding landscape. When it withdraws, it leaves hundreds of "tidepools" in its path. These pools then serve as hotspots for mosquito larvae. The most terrain sporting the most of these devious little habitats were rocky, even riverbank where the water has thousands of holes to enter and no help from gravity to drain. In these pools we found several species of mosquito, as well as one very ...

Hello again!  I spent this week in a whirlwind. Fellow RaHP-Vec interns and I placed mosquito traps around Fort Collins on Monday, sorted caught mosquitoes Tuesday, and conducted insecticide resistance bottle bioassays with them on Wednesday. We repeated the process on Thursday and Friday. I think I have looked in the eyes of more mosquitoes than people this week, which is a totally normal experience, right? We collected mosquitoes at the Environmental Learning Center in Fort Collins, on the shores of a small lake. Emerald Cordova, Grace Doerner, Isabelle Byland, and I set up 5 traps each time. We captured plenty of mosquitoes, which we then buckled into a makeshift car seat (see picture below!) It was rewarding work; we got good yields each time. Even better, I got to spend time outside. We brought a butterfly net and caught dragonflies. I used a larval scooper to find rocks and empty snail shells in the shallows of the lake. It was 80 million degrees out, but it was worth it. I h...

 Week two was all about getting into the rhythm of fieldwork and continuing to explore different areas within Environmental Health. I helped set mosquito traps at four different locations and then returned to collect them and identify the specimens. Sorting through the trap contents was definitely more challenging than expected, there were so many insects that looked like mosquitoes at first glance, and it took time and patience to carefully sort and ID the right species. It's a process that really tests your attention to detail, but also makes you appreciate how much goes into quality surveillance work. I also had the opportunity to shadow the Onsite Wastewater Treatment System (OWTS) team during a ride-along. We visited about ten sites with open permits and conducted inspections to make sure everything was progressing according to plan. It was really eye-opening to see how these inspections are done, and I learned a lot about the systems themselves, from how they’re designed to...

 Hey everyone!  I'm Jon Wegryn, and I am currently working as a RaHP VEC intern at Colorado State University in the Center for Vector-Borne Infectious Diseases. The lab I'm apart of is studying ticks and tick-borne diseases. We're also conducting studies on the relationships of ticks and the understory vegetation they're found on, as wells as the microhabitats they prefer.  On a personal note, I'm a senior at CSU studying Restoration Ecology and will be graduating this fall! I have a great fondness for plants and have a fascination for all of the intricate parts that are important in ecosystems. I'm orginally from Michigan, but really love Fort Collins and its vicinity to all of the natural areas.

 Hello everyone.  My name is Brian Hinnant and I am interning at the Delta County Mosquito Control District.  I am looking forward to learning about how our work plays a significant part in the prevention of vector-borne diseases and how it will tie in to the overall public health sector of the county. I am currently a senior at Colorado Mesa University majoring in cellular, molecular, and developmental biology with hopes of attending gradate school in the same course of study.  My career goal is to land a job investigating the underlying mechanisms of diseases and to help develop targeted therapies.  My hobbies include biking, golfing, landscaping, and artifact hunting.       We've only been at it for one week so far in Delta, but I look forward to posting future updates as well as keeping up on all of yours from your respective areas!

    Hello all! Apologies on the belated nature of this blog post, I was unaware of certain temporal expectations for these entries. However, there has been plenty to report on! I have been operating as a field technician down here in Durango, which has been equal parts illuminating and alarming. It has been illuminating in that I have learned so much of what transpires behind the scenes for the well-being of the public; a tremendous amount of labor and resources is dedicated towards the preservation of the district's health. However, it has been alarming because I now understand exactly how critical mosquito management is, particularly in an area like the Animas River Valley that is prone to flooding and sports an impressive number of sloughs. Attached is a photo of a dip from a recent field day; safe to say, we have them bad down here (this may not seem like a catastrophic dip, but by my limited frame of reference this is significant). We have been embarking out into the dept...

  This week things really ramped up! I’ve never worked with mosquitoes before (only mice/rats and cell cultures) so this was a big change for me. I got to go inside the CSU insectary for the first time! It's such a cool facility, and the rearing process for mosquitoes is so much more in depth then I expected. After what I learned this week, it's hard for me to believe mosquitos can hatch in the wild.  Outside of basic handling and safety training I ran my first bottle assay.  I did this with Oliva (also a RaPH VEC intern) to test insecticide resistance. The difference between susceptible mosquitoes’ vs wild mosquitoes’ knock down time is staggering.One thing that surprised me was that the CDC protocol for bottle assay testing recommends a different method of exposure than what would happen in the field/real world. However Dr. Saavedra-Rodriguez (who’s the PI) is having us do both methods. I really love that she's doing both types of testing because I think it's really c...

 Hi, I'm Autumn (she/they)! I'm a Biology major at Occidental College in Los Angeles, where I'm also pursuing a minor in Urban & Environmental Policy. I grew up in Albuquerque and will be working with the city's division of the RaHP VEC Program this summer. I'm passionate about biology, environmental issues, public health, and social justice. Outside of class, I have lab experience in genetics and cell biology. I'm really looking forward to the work we'll be doing together!

 Hello!     I am Jake Brisnehan, a RaHP VEC intern through Colorado State University. I work in Dr. Hemming-Schroeder's lab on a tick project that involves identifying correlations between tick presence and various forest understory characteristics. I am a senior at CSU with two majors: Fish, Wildlife, and Conservation Biology and Statistics. I am mostly drawn to the statistical side of things and think some of the models involving wildlife are awesome! I hope to explore different paths to take our project on the modeling side this summer, and have enjoyed the field work collecting ticks in the Poudre Canyon.     Outside of school/research, I like to play piano, draw animals as realistically as I can, play frisbee golf, and go fishing. I am from Broomfield, Colorado, but I have loved living in Fort Collins during my time at CSU. In the future, I hope to explore more national parks around the country, as well as cool places in Colorado.      I am e...

 Hello, everyone!         My name is Emerald Cordova, and I am a RaHP VEC intern at Colorado State University. I am an upcoming third-year undergraduate student majoring in Biomedical Sciences with a concentration in Microbiology and Infectious Disease. I am still relatively new to the research world, but I love everything that I have done and learned so far. There are many future career options that I am still considering after graduation, but I'm most interested in pursuing a PhD in microbiology or molecular biology. I work in Dr. Rebekah Kading’s lab and plan to focus my RaHP VEC project around public outreach to inform others about mosquito-borne illnesses, such as West Nile Virus.  In my free time, I love being out in nature, writing or reading, and spending time with my family. I am from Colorado Springs, so I am fortunate to be able to visit home often. However, I also enjoy living in Fort Collins. When given the opportunity, I will take part ...

 Hello!  My name is Olivia Martinez, I am a RaHP-Vec intern at Colorado State University this summer. I just graduated with my bachelor's in Biomedical Sciences, concentrating in Microbiology and Infectious Disease. Since my freshman year of college, I have wanted to go into biomedical research. For the past two and a half years, I conducted research in mosquito egg-laying behavior in Dr. Rebekah Kading's lab. I'm excited to apply the skills I've learned to RaHP-Vec, and to learn so much more! After this summer, I will be spending a year as a research associate in New York City, still studying mosquitoes! I am planning to apply to microbiology Ph.D. programs this year, focusing on vector-borne diseases with a One Health approach. I want to study pathogens, the vectors that carry them, and how their transmission affects people. Outside of the lab, I love to read nonfiction, care for my forest of houseplants, watch random documentaries, and do anything creative. Above all...

 Hello everyone! My name is Olivia Martinez, and I am a RaHP-Vec intern in the Center for Vector-borne Infectious Diseases at Colorado State University. I am in beautiful Fort Collins, a city currently being barraged with rain. That can be good or bad; more rain means everything is green. I love watching Fort Collins wake up from winter. The bad side of rain: more mosquitoes. Although, for this group, that has its bright side. More mosquitoes means more to study! This summer, I am studying insecticide resistance in wild-caught and lab-reared mosquitoes. So far, I have focused on  Aedes aegypti, the species infamous for the transmission of diseases like dengue, yellow fever, and Zika. We are testing several species of mosquitoes from around the country to see if they are resistant to certain insecticides. To do this, we are using bottle bioassays (see picture below!). The test is simple, but very effective. We place about 20 mosquitoes in a bottle that has been coated inside wi...

Hello Everyone! My name is Jackson DeCook and I am a current RaHP VEC graduate fellow and MPH student concentrating in Epidemiology at the Colorado School of Public Health, from which I graduate next spring!  I have worked in disease control and surveillance for multiple years now, beginning as a field technician and then a surveillance technician in the Vector Disease Control International Loveland office in Colorado. This experience was during my Undergraduate degree at CSU where I studied Microbiology. When I started graduate school, I joined the Foy lab at the Center for Vector-borne Infectious Diseases at CSU where I have been working on WNV endectocide research with Brian Foy's ivermectin trial and evaluating WNV transmission risk/entomological risk indices. I have also been participating in a WNV KAP surveying and messaging study with Dr. Nicole Kelp and data management on Vectorsurv. I am in the process of writing a manuscript for publication for the first time, so I am exc...

 Hello all!  I am a little late to the game, unfortunately. I just got back from a month long trip in Borneo, Malaysia where I studied habitat conservation at the Danau Girang Field Centre.  I am Therese Turner, a current senior at the University of Wyoming pursuing a bachelor's degree in Wildlife and Fisheries Biology and Management with a minor in Rangeland Ecology and Watershed Management. For this summer, I will be working with the City of Laramie to study mosquito surveillance and vector-borne disease control as an intern of the RaHP VEC program! Most of my experience in the past has to do with avian and mammal studies, so I am very excited for the opportunity to learn about something new. A bit about my history, I was originally born in Santa Fe, Texas where I grew up on a small farm. We were active in the community fair each year and had many rabbits, chickens, and turkeys among others. When I was seven, however, we moved up to Broomfield, Colorado where I remained...

 Hi again! It's later now! Anyways, work has been ramping up recently, as we prepare for our Buffalo Turbine experiment. If I haven't given enough detail before, I'll do so now: Buffalo Turbine is a company that makes a big machine to vaporize our insecticide product and fire it upwards, with the goal of having the mist arc over the front of houses and land in the backyard, where most container breeding occurs. Aedes aegypti are an increasing issue in a lot of ABQ, and they love small hidden bits of water in backyards.  The larvicide is VectoBac WDG, WDG being 'water dispersible granules'. It contains  Bacillus thuringiensis  subsp.  israelensis , a bacteria that's very toxic when ingested by the larvae. It's much safer for other organisms than a lot of other control options, and resistance is rare, especially considering our invasive Aedes are already resistant to most other mosquito control agents.  To make sure the Buffalo Turbine system is effective i...

 Hey all! Not much to report here thus far honestly. It has still mostly just been trapping and IDing, y'know the standard fare.  Although we have had some interesting turnouts from some of our EX traps, with one set having exclusively Aegypti and a lot of them. We've also had a lot of good rain here the past few days which has been nice, albeit a little inconvenient when trying to work with the traps. I expect to have more exciting things to report in the future once we start setting out new traps and spraying for the Buffalo Turbine. Until then, take care and good luck!

My first week with the Zoonosis Team at Jefferson County Public Health was a great introduction to both the people and the work ahead this summer. I started with orientation, meeting staff, and learning more about the structure of the department and the intern roles. Everyone was incredibly welcoming and made the transition feel smooth. I also had the chance to sit in on a meeting with the entire Environmental Health department. It was really interesting to see how different programs come together, each person brought something unique to the table, and it gave me a better understanding of how broad and interdisciplinary this work is. The Zoonosis team hosted a lunch where we went over trapping locations and field guides, and later in the day we jumped into mosquito ID training. We learned to identify key species including Culex tarsalis , Culex pipiens , Psorophora , Anopheles , and Aedes , and even got to look at a few ticks! We also had conversations about our interests and goals for...

This was my first week at the Weld County health department. Weld County doesn’t start doing its mosquito trapping and testing until June. So instead most of what I did this week was familiarize myself with the data logging system for mosquitoes that have been tested. Weld county is one of the largest counties in Colorado (4,017 mi²). To cover everything Weld county is divided into three zones that contain the largest populations. Resources are finite therefore in order to protect the most people it makes sense to catch and test in the highest population zones, but it does mean that we have to limit testing in the more rural areas of Weld Country. While I understand that this is how we protect the largest proportion of people it's also hard to swallow. Hopefully in the future there will be some opportunity to monitor these more rural communities.    Below is a link to the Weld County WNV page that has a map of what areas are monitored. Sorry I couldn't uplaod the photo here. h...

 Heya, sorry this is a bit late I blanked on making a post last week so I'm doing it now. Most of what we did in the last week was trapping and IDing.  For the trapping it mainly consisted of setting out and collecting both light and gravid traps. I did not set out traps this week that was handled by Ella and Jessie. However, I did collect traps alongside Autumn.  There was also a lot of IDing to be done this week, which I am slowly but surely improving at. Primarily I handled gravid traps and found primarily mosquitos of the Aedes Vexans and Aedes Dorsalis species. My favorite to look at though is probably the Aedes Aegypti I love their patterning. No pictures this week but hopefully I'll have some for my next post.  Not much else to report thus far it'll probably mostly be more trapping and IDing in the future, but it's pretty fun as long as you have other people to work with. Everyone has been great thus far and I very much so look forward to continuing our work....

 Hi again all! This is Ella. Work is all according to plan in ABQ. We RaHP VEC students have completed two trapping runs now. Plus some extra traps, which can be placed at citizen request. The trapping runs take all day, but it's not too bad with the AC, snacks, and friends in the car :) Most of the other work was IDing! There are a lot of bugs, but even more to come!! It is not peak season yet.  My favorite species (so far) is Culex tarsalis, because they have white vertical stripes on their legs. Very cute. There are also some other insects that come in as bycatch in the traps, and I've got a collection of those going so I can pin them. I am still learning how to take good photos with the microscope, but here's some teasers (they look a lot blurrier on the computer haha). I really like the combo of labwork and fieldwork. It gives a chance to have varied experience, and getting the entire picture of what we do really helps with science communication and public outreach, wh...