Olivia Martinez- My First Week!

 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 with a mixture of acetone and an insecticide. We then count how many mosquitoes have died at multiple timepoints. In a nutshell, I sit and watch mosquitoes die for an hour. AND IT IS SO COOL. 

...do you ever have the thought "When I was a kid, I didn't picture doing this for my job"? I do, sometimes. Kid Olivia wouldn't believe me if I told her "Mosquitoes are going to be your life, and you are going to LOVE IT." Yet here we are! 

I am very excited to be working with all of you. I will be doing fieldwork this summer, and will hopefully get some pretty nature pictures to share. Bye for now!