Week 2

     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 ours. Overall, its been interesting and I am excited to see what the results will be!