Jamie Medina Soto - Post 1

 Hello everyone!

My name is Jamie, and I am currently an undergraduate student at Eastern New Mexico University. I have a major in Forensic Biology with a minor in Health Communications. Even though I go to ENMU, I am in Albuquerque this summer, which is where I have the wonderful opportunity to gain many new experiences from this internship!

I have been slowly getting accustomed to the tasks we do per week, but I would say overall it has been a very enjoyable experience so far! 

We have been trying to expand our area of mosquito surveillance to the West side, this was our first official attempt.... and was not so favorable. Setting the traps was no problem, collecting, however, collection was a different story. One of our planned sites (a golf course) had not informed all of its employees of our mosquito traps, and ended up throwing them away! Long story short, we were able to thankfully recover all of them with minimal damage. Below is a picture of me along with a fellow colleague, putting our recovered traps back into our work truck.

Besides that minor bump in the road, I say it was a pretty successful first attempt, and I am confident that our next attempts will only be more successful!

Next week, we will also attempt to set our traps on the east side, which I am excited to see come to fruition. Hopefully, our expanded routes can give us a better view of WNV across the city of Albuquerque.

In addition to mosquito trapping, collection, and identification, I was also allowed to help a graduate student from UNM with their project. They come to our labs regularly to collect mosquitoes that we have been growing in bug dorms to test for mosquito resistance to permethrin (an insecticide) using bottle bioassays. As you can see in the picture below, I was given an aspirator to retrieve mosquitoes from the bug dorm. Once I've collected enough in the tube, I then expel them into the bottles aligned to my right. 

I did a lot of new things this week and am looking forward to what else this internship has to offer. That is all from me for now. I look forward to seeing what everyone else's experience will be with this internship!