Week 3-4: Grace
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 getting a lot of practice finding the best places for traps. I feel like I’m playing geo-guesser when I go on google maps, looking for ideal trap sites. Most areas ended up being public parks, but occasionally some areas are agriculture drainage ditches or adjacent areas. I think getting data from the rural/agricultural areas is going to be really interesting because while, yes there is a lower population, the other conditions are pretty ideal. Except fertilizer run off might kill them. I genuinely have no idea what mosquito populations look like under that type of condition.
The idea of how fertilizer run off really blends well with the lab work I’ve been doing at CSU. Olivia and I have been spending the last couple of weeks doing insecticide resistance testing! While fertilizer exposure is different I think that the bottle assays approach could also be used for something like this.
This was also my first week doing mosquito IDing. I never thought I'd be so grateful for an easily identifiable mosquito but I am. I love that you can spot Culex tarsalis with the naked eye most of the time. Also who knew that Aedes vexan’s gold color was so beautiful under the microscope!
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