Week 3 Ella Eleven

 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 in urban/semiurban Albuquerque, we're monitoring Aedes aegypti counts in treatment and control neighborhoods. This means adding 48 new trap sites on two trapping days! A lot of logistics. Luckily, we've used the traps before: 'Sentinel' traps with combined CO2 and scentbait lures are our best for catching Aedes aegypti.  

So, when we go out on those runs starting next week, I'll have some more fun updates for you guys. Otherwise, work has been pretty normal. Trap mosqutios, ID mosquitos. We want to help Dr. Nicole Kelp with her flyer-ing and surveying. And we'll soon get to help Dr. Ivy Hurwitz and Dianne Peterson with UNM wet lab work. Collaboration is cool!!

That's all for that. Let's see how my blog post fares after our seminar tomorrow about doing better blog posts. 

Here are some more bug pictures. Please note that what you see here coming out of our Buffalo Turbine is dyed red for visualization purposes, the real product will not be red!