Matilda Bowen- Intro & Blog Post #1

Hello everyone! My name is Matilda and I am an undergraduate from the University of New Mexico majoring in Environmental Science and minoring in Biology. I am currently planning on getting my degree in entomology after I receive my bachelor's and eventually continue working with mosquitoes in vector-borne disease control in New Mexico. I'm working in New Mexico with the City of Albuquerque's Environmental Health department who is collaborating with UNM to survey mosquito populations and test for both insecticide resistance and West Nile virus. 

Cute photo of a mosquito larva under a microscope taken by one of my fellow interns

These past few weeks have mostly been comprised of learning the protocols for trapping, collecting, identifying mosquitoes, and then vialing them to send off to UNM for disease testing. I've gotten to do so much so far that it's very difficult to pinpoint the highlights of what I've been up to, but here are a few of my favorite things I've been doing. 

I've been quickly memorizing the routes we follow when we go out to set and collect our mosquito traps. Our routes are also really fun; you get to drive around areas in the city you usually wouldn't have access to otherwise. One of these areas is the Albuquerque Biopark and Zoo where we set our light, gravid, and sentinel traps! Below is a picture of one of our gravid traps that I set in our Zoo location, next to the chimps. For our gravid traps, there is fermented manure in water sitting in the bottom of that black tub that attracts mosquitoes, and then the metal contraption that sits above the water sucks up any mosquitoes into the net using a fan and motor system that is powered by a battery. 

Besides our trapping routes and identifying many, many mosquitoes, I have also begun point mounting some of our lab's mosquito specimens. This is mostly a task that I do when there isn't any mosquito identifying, vialing, or any other of our weekly tasks to be done and I want to zone out for a while. I take the specimens from a live population we raised here in the lab from one of our sites and collect the dead ones to pin. We've been raising these larvae to see what species we get from this specific location and have a graduate student in the lab using the live ones for pesticide resistance assays. I've always been nervous about trying point mounting, as it looks more difficult than pinning other larger insects, but it's been easy to get the hang of. I'd even go so far as to say that it is much easier than pinning other insects. Plus, the way the mosquitoes look while pinned delights me endlessly, so I find myself doing it often. 

Some of the mosquitoes I've pinned. These ones still need their location labels and to be identified. 

We've been raising the larvae we collected from one of our sites in these canopies.

This internship is a dream come true for me. I never would've thought that I would get to work directly with professionals in the field I want to go into as only an undergraduate, let alone have my dream job for the whole summer. I could not be happier interning here and learning directly from the wonderful mosquito team. I look forward to sharing more of what I'm up to in theses coming weeks!