July 4th Update - Fort Collins

 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 would like to complete all of our resistance data by looking into the KDR mutations. 

I have attached a pretty photo of a flower I took out in the field!