Recap of the First Few Weeks - Fort Collins

 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 high school students. It was very fun to set up the activities which allowed students to see the different phases of the mosquito life cycle. I personally was over excited to watch some eggs hatching under the microscope. I was amazed that I had submerged them in water at 1PM and by 430PM they were popping the tops off those little eggs. I had never seen anything like it and it was amazing to feel so fascinated by a creature I have spent the better part of 2 years with.

I think the highlight of this most recent week was definitely finding a mosquito that we were not able to ID because it was covered in some sort of fungus. I had never seen that before and to be able to take a really cool picture (yes I have attached it) was definitely a highlight for me.