Rockies and High Plains Vector-borne Diseases Center Summer Internship

Hello,     We have been working hard on analyzing the results for our tick study from last summer. As mentioned before, we are studying the correlations of tick presence and numbers with different vegetation types in Colorado wild areas. I have been modeling our data with some different parameters to find the greatest fit and to see where these correlations are significant/strongest. Nothing is final, but some interesting patterns and outcomes are worth noting.       We have decided to use a Zero-inflated Generalized Linear Mixed Model with our data, which splits the results into two categories, one for the correlations with the presence of ticks alone, and one for the correlations with the number of ticks. No matter what I have done so far in the modeling, one variable has a very strong correlation with tick numbers: time of year. This was to be expected; we saw a drastic drop in abundance as the summer progressed last year, and it's nice to see that this ...

We have been met with a diabolically confounding problem throughout the course of the past few weeks. Inspection and treatment has been in full swing, and yet; adult mosquitos are appearing in the Animas River Valley in numbers not seen in over a decade. This has been an exceptionally dry summer, not one conducive to the creation of mosquito habitat. So the question remains; where are they coming from?  We have several hypotheses as to this problem, chiefly the migration of mosquitos from unmanaged US Forest Service lands to populated areas where they are reported. If this is indeed the case, the problem we are encountering will be a prolonged and nuanced one. US Forest Service lands are notoriously tricky to gain access to as a commercial organization, and much more so if you plan on dispersing active compounds within the area. Attached is video evidence of the prolific numbers of adults we are seeing; 69,000 in a single trap! As I mentioned above, these numbers have not been ...

 Hi everybody again!  We have been continuing to roll out workplace flow improvements. The lovely Jess and Jessie worked together to make photo documents of each Buffalo Turbine site, so that the traps are placed in the same place every time, which is especially helpful when different people set and pickup traps. This afternoon I made a macro that can reformat our usual data entry method for batch uploading to VectorSurv, where people around the US can see our mosquito counts. Still have to enter our testing data, which I worked on last week and Morgan is doing this week!! Our plate last week went perfectly. The controls and standard curves performed just as they're supposed to. We did get some positive results but I believe those are being double checked before we release anything, so obviously I can't share what places and when. But! Results are coming in, and they're coming in with a short turnaround, which is great. I stayed in lab most of this week, doing auxiliary stu...

Hello again! So far on my end it has primarily been still getting buffalo turbine and regular trapping done. We've also been working in getting out samples to UNM's labs in order to test for West Nile. We've gotten a few positive results back thus far, but not too many.  Most of week 7 for me has been working in the UNM lab and learning how to do actual testing for ST Louis Encephalitis and West Nile, which has been very interesting. We have a machine called the Kingfisher which has been fun to get to figure out how to use. I'm not too sure on the specifics but it's basically a large batch testing machine for RNA testing which runs pretty quickly. Personally, I quite enjoy doing lab work and looking forward to hopefully doing more in the future.  Not many updates thus far, hopefully there will be something more interesting to report in the future. Until then I wish you all the best of luck!

 Like many of the other counties in Colorado, Weld has officially had their first positive WNV mosquitos. We had a huge jump in positive mosquitoes from our first + week to now. Every zone in Weld has mosquitos with WNV. However despite the unusual amount of rain Weld has been getting out overall mosquito numbers are pretty average. I do wonder how the high levels of positive mosquitos but normal # will affect the number of human cases in Weld. The unfortunate part about doing WNV work is that even when we do get human cases there isn't much we can do other than palliative care and prevention education. We've been trying to do senior education about WNV and providing mosquito repellent but it's also hard to always avoid mosquitos, no matter what age you are. But hopefully it will help at least a couple people feel more prepared for WNV season.

West Nile surveillance over here at Jefferson County Public Health is progressing smoothly. Sabrina and I have added another surveillance site in JeffCo, so we're up to 6 sites total. Last week, one of our sites captured 2,200 mosquitoes, which is more than all the Culex mosquitoes collected in JeffCo from 2010 to 2020 combined . This made for a long day of ID-ing, but we're getting very efficient at ID-ing those little guys. This site is also a bird sanctuary, so I'm particularly interested to follow it for the summer given that West Nile is an avian disease. In the past couple weeks, I've also had the opportunity to shadow JeffCo's epidemiology team, as we had our first suspected West Nile case a couple weeks ago. It ended up not being a true West Nile case, but it was interesting to see the human epidemiology side of the surveillance work we're doing. When not in the field, I've been continuing to work through past years' surveillance data, dating bac...

 This week, we were exploring the potential development of Natular resistance in mosquito larvae. This was in response to a suspicious number of treatments giving way to larval activity before their listed expiration date. We have been treating the vast majority of these sites with Natular products, both in briquette and granular form. The newfound resistance to these products is alarming, considering the frequency with which we employ them. To test resistance, we captured hundreds of 2nd-stage larvae. These larvae were then sorted into cups with increasing concentrations of Natular G30. The larvae were "fed" twice daily. In total, the experiment ran for three days. The findings were concerning; ~20-30% of larvae survived all stages of treatment, with an additional ~10% surviving until the last treatment. This displays a clear resistance to Natular products, at least with larvae located in the Animas district.  The actions to be taken following this experiment are at the mome...

       We have spent the week trapping in two new locations. Using VDCI data we are able to see where they are having success with light traps and catching Culex tarsalis specifically. This source is probably our best decision so far. We were able to trap in two plains locations (which we predicted would have a higher percentage of Culex than Aedes  based on our other trapping data). These two locations have yielded lots and lots of Culex tarsalis as promised!      Also, we received a special delivery from Laramie, Wyoming. Two sun tea containers full of larvae. They were ingeniously packaged and very very amusing. (Note the do not expose to direct sunlight warning, they do not recommended making actual mosquito sun tea.)      Lastly, my new favorite things to look at, I have found more mosquitoes with fungi and taken very cool photos of them. I will attach my favorite one which looks like the little guy is wearing sunglasses. ...

  We started off the week strong by trying to assemble a bottle spinning rack in order to make our bottle assays easier. Little did we know it was not a small Ikea assembly; it was extremely difficult for no reason and set us back a little bit for time. This week we focused on trapping at Dixon Reservoir. The previous location, ERLC, was mostly Culex tarsalis with some Aedes Vexen. Dixon was mostly Aedes Vexen with some Culex tarsalis. That was a surprising difference. We are currently hypothesizing that the locations closer to plains areas in Fort Collins (the ERLC) will contain more Culex while the locations closer to foothills habitats (Dixon) have more Aedes. Therefore, we are going to trap in more Easter Fort Collins plains areas moving forward to see if we can continue the pattern and get mostly Culex.   Lastly, I began DNA extractions of the recovered and dead Culex from ERLC because we wo uld like to complete all of our resistance data by looking into the KDR m...

Hello everyone!  We are keeping busy here at Delta County Public Health and Delta County Mosquito Control District.  Sam (my fellow intern) and I have gotten into a solid routine of identifying species from traps on Mondays and Tuesdays and inputting the data into VectorSurv.  We have sent roughly 30 samples containing Culex tarsalis to the lab since we started in mid-June.   We are not overrun by mosquito density by any means, but some of our trap locations have steadily consisted of about 30 - 70 % tarsalis.  I am going over our lab sample results as I am typing this on our LabOnline program and thankfully there have been no positives for WNV!      For all of you mosquito aficionados - A pic we took of one of the tarsalis from our traps this week. As you can see, she recently had her blood meal and was about ready to lay her eggs.    Yesterday was a hot field day (100+ degrees) on the outskirts of town and we were able to loc...

  July 9th - Buffalo Turbine in Full Swing and lots of Culex tarsalis The past few weeks have been really busy here in Albuquerque! Our buffalo turbine mosquito larvicide project has gotten underway and has our whole team working on trapping and collecting our data to monitor if the larvicide method is an effective method of mosquito control in Albuquerque. With 6 different neighborhoods with 8 trapping sites each we find ourselves taking turns driving around Albuquerque.  My favorite part, but probably the most difficult, of this process has been interacting with residents. In previous weeks I managed to talk to residents while delivering around 200 letters door to door in the trial neighborhoods. This week while trapping and collecting the Buffalo Turbine sites I have gotten to talk with some very chatty folks curious about what I was doing in their neighbor’s front yard with a weird looking trap and a 12V battery. I have been lucky enough to have only had friendly conversat...

 This week has consisted of a lot more of literature research. Its been really interesting looking into previous studies and what the authors were trying to uncover. Its very fascinating reading about the different tick species and their environmental preferences. I've found so far that it really depends on the tick species and the region of the world the are located. I'm really excited to see what are findings turn out to be and what kind of micrhabitats and environmental conditions the tick species' we're studying turn out to be.  I've also been going through pictures taken by some collegues last year in Utah and identifying the plant species in the pictures. Which has been a nice break from all of the reading and focusing on my specialities for a little bit.

Last week, Rebecca and I wrapped up our fourth week of mosquito trapping for West Nile Virus surveillance here in Jefferson County, CO. We’ve expanded our trapping to six sites, with Kestrel Pond newly added to the mix, and it definitely made an impression. That site brought in the most mosquitoes we've seen so far, with 875 total across different species. Out of those, 530 were Culex , so it’s safe to say the ID process took quite a while! Most of our sites had higher mosquito activity than usual last week, and it coincided with Jefferson County confirming its first human case of West Nile Virus for the season, definitely a reminder of the importance of this work. We’re also getting ready to begin uploading our surveillance data into VectorSurv, which will help contribute to broader regional monitoring efforts. Looking forward to diving into that side of the project. And of course, not every trap was full of mosquitoes, one was almost entirely moths (photo below). A good remind...

  Happy Monday!  My work last week was typical of what I have been doing over the past few weeks, in addition to some new things I learned. We finished trapping and testing mosquitoes for insecticide resistance at our second site, so this week we will start trapping in a new area. At our previous trapping site, we had a huge yield of Aedes vexans , so it will be interesting to see if we can find a place with more Culex tarsalis this time around. I also worked with other RaHP VEC interns and Tim to learn how to upload data onto VectorSurv. VectorSurv is a site that utilizes maps to display where mosquitoes have been tested for insecticide resistance and their resistance statuses. Additionally, it can be used to show arbovirus detection by the year various viruses have been logged, including West Nile Virus. It’s fun to be able to get a visualization of the data we’re working on. Once again, I find our data to be so exciting due to the direct impact that it has on our commu...

Hi all! I would have some really cool new mosquito photos to post but I got a new phone and the super-old Leica microscope photos app does not transfer, and the old one is erased already. Very sad! Oh well, I have some alternate things to show.  These last weeks have been *relatively* business as usual. Distributed 900 letters to houses in our Buffalo Turbing sites across all of us, me and Morgan did ~350 ourselves! Other one time operations plus the usual IDing. We had a trap with 642 Culex tarsalis alone!! A fair portion of our brain time at work is dedicated to finding more efficient ways to do the same old things... less work grabbing stuff out of the truck, best ways to carry things, ergonomics, etc. But I feel happy when we figure out a new way to do something. Maximum efficiency may one day be obtained? Have any of you seen Star Trek: Lower Decks? If you know, you know. We also have to do a lot of planning ahead of time to put five people across our four task categories! (La...

  June 30th – WNV and SLE Testing Protocol This week, I worked with our collaborators in Dr. Ivy Hurwitz’s lab at the University of New Mexico to learn the testing protocol for West Nile Virus (WNV) and St. Louis Encephalitis (SLE). The process spans approximately three days and involves three main steps. The first step involves processing mosquito samples collected from our traps. We grouped the mosquitoes into testing pools and lysed them to prepare for RNA extraction. In the second step, we extracted RNA from the pooled samples. Once the RNA was isolated, we proceeded with the third step: testing for WNV and SLE using a quantitative PCR (qPCR) protocol. My time in Dr. Hurwitz’s lab was both educational and enjoyable. I appreciated the opportunity to meet the team and learn about their ongoing projects. In addition to WNV and SLE testing, the lab is also conducting research on pesticide resistance, an issue that has come up frequently during my time with RaHP Vec. After having wi...

  Over the past two weeks I've learned so much! I've done my first couple of solo runs when it comes to setting up traps and am finally really getting into species identifying. It's definitely becoming much easier to differentiate between Culex tarsalis and Culex pipiens! And all the Aedes species. I've really fallen in love with the color pattern of Aedes dorsalis. I didn't realise that the native host of West Nile Virus was birds. Because of that the Foy lab at CSU does a lot of work with both mosquitos and birds. I went out with the Foy lab and learned how to catch and hold birds. One of the members of the lab also did a demo of how to draw blood from birds. Hopefully in the future I’ll get a chance to learn how to do a bird blood draw. That way I can help do West Nile Virus testing directly from birds.   Outside of the lab the public health work had been super interesting. I've been doing  mostly outreach this week, specifically in senior education. I've...

Hello everyone! Since a major part of what I am doing is identifying and counting this mosquitoes, I think it is important to go over the counting process. Within the City of Laramie, we have these cards or mats we use to sort the mosquitoes.  On these mats, you can see a list of eight mosquitoes. These are our most commonly found species. They have short descriptors that help identify them if you are less practiced. After that, it's more used for organization. In this photo below, you can see that I have used them quite a bit.  These are very useful for the larger sets of mosquitoes. I have counted up to thousands of mosquitoes in these cups that we collect. When reaching numerbers into the thousands, it can be understandably time consuming. One cup of a thousand mosquitoes can take hours to sort through. With so many cups reaching these high numbers, however, we would be unable to count these species in a realistic amount of time. There are around 20 sites that we must sort ...

      At this point in the year, ticks aren't out nearly as much, so it's hard to get great numbers for our mark-recapture study this year. We have stopped fieldwork for the study and are now working on the data we collected from last year and this year. My colleague, Jon Wegryn, and I have been looking into different factors of the understory that may be correlated with tick presence or abundance. I have been researching some statistical models to capture the data as well. So far, it seems that a zero-inflated, mixed-effect model is going to be the best option for our data, but I'm curious to see what parameters will have the largest effects on our data and what correlations are present.      In my free time, I have also been looking into Bayesian Statistics. As I learn more, it seems that there could be some application to this study as well, but I'll have to do more research and keep learning to see if that's true. Overall, it has been really interesting...

      I've had a pretty busy week going through published academic papers to develop a literture review to find similarities in other studies and ours, focusing on tick species and their relationship with local vegetation and the microhabitats they live in. It's been really interesting seeing the ideas and experiments others have conducted and the conclusions they come to! It's been really fascinating reading up on the behaviour of ticks as they tend to act in ways I wouldn't expect them to. Its given me several ideas and has made me even more excited to start writing our research paper!

  Hello, all! Last week was super crazy, but very eventful. We spent the week trapping in a new area that I really enjoy. I have found that field work is one of my favorite parts of the job, as it is a nice break up between lab and computer work. It often is like going on a little hike, and the weather in Fort Collins has been so nice recently (if not a bit too warm). Along with mosquitoes, it’s fun to observe the other insects and birds inhabiting the areas we visit. After we collect our yield, we start sorting the mosquitoes. The process of sorting is a bit tedious, but it is now getting easier every time that I do it. It involves using an aspirator to suck the mosquitoes out of the traps, then we put them into plastic bags that we stick under the microscope in order to identify. After we ID each one, we separate them based on species to be used in the bottle assays. IDing is also starting to move faster now that I have become more familiar with the defining characteristics u...