Week Next - Ella Eleven ABQ

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! (Lab work, Historic route trapping, Buffalo turbine trapping, and UNM Labwork). Next week I am going to be at UNM for three whole days, following the whole protocol to get all our mosquitos tested. Keep an eye out for that update, I'll make sure to get a lot to work with.

I love data entry, and got an Excel macro going to help. "Culex" and "Culiseta" are similar enough that for autofill to catch "Culex" you have to go all the way to "cule"! That takes so much time! And the city keyboard is a little sticky, so believe me, it's work. But now when you put in "quinquefasciatus" or "tarsalis" in the species category, it autofills "Culex". Now that's efficiency. I realize this is not the most exciting stuff, but there's a chance some of you have to do the same stuff. Maybe it helps! 

This was a pretty grab-bag blog entry, but that's how our job is. Doing what you can when you can! As for the photos: I pinned some bugs! Mostly older ones, which have gone through MANY freeze-thaw cycles. So they're pretty fragile. Still, got one of my three vinegaroons down. Got a lot of excess mosquitos from the job I want to pin as well (We count Aedes vexans but don't save them). Next, weevil hiding shyly in my hand like a puppy. Black widow on one of our traps (shook safely onto the ground!) Snails we found. And, finally an art piece I'm making for my friend based on a Jeopardy question about tardigrades. This is the sketch, I'm hopefully doing the final tomorrow or Sunday. I want to post my mosquito art but that paper is somewhere else right now. You'll see it later!