Thad Allen Post 2

Hello again! Today I'll be giving a short overview on Salt Lake City Mosquito Abatement district's (SLCMAD) mosquito surveillance activities. Alina already posted about trapping and counting, so I'll be providing some extra pictures and explanations of how traps get processed once the lab staff return from the field! I continue to forget to take pictures of the actual traps, so check out Alina's post for cool fieldwork photos.

On Mondays and Wednesdays, technicians from SLCMAD's lab team set 40+ traps to capture egg laying and host seeking female mosquitoes. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, these traps are collected. Each trap contains a plastic bin connected to a net that all the mosquitoes get funneled into (see below). These bins get placed in a freezer to kill the mosquitoes.

After the bins are frozen, technicians spread the trap's contents out in a large bin and take a large photo. Then, the total number of mosquitoes per trap are counting using the program imageJ.

A subset of the total mosquitoes in each trap (there can be 10s of 1000s in the most productive traps!) are set aside in metal containers with a laminated label.

Technicians identify each mosquito in these subsamples (a few hundred per trap) and record the number of each species present. The relative numbers of each species, combined with the total number of mosquitoes, allow them to estimate the total number of each species per trap.

This process allows SLCMAD to keep an eye on mosquito numbers across the season and to modify treatment plans accordingly. They also test Culex mosquitoes for West Nile Virus and St. Louis Encephalitis Virus in "pools" of 10-100 mosquitoes. The mosquitoes are loaded into 2mL snap-cap tubes with bbs in them to be ground up and tested using qPCR.