Rockies and High Plains Vector-borne Diseases Center Summer Internship

 This week has consisted of a lot more of literature research. Its been really interesting looking into previous studies and what the authors were trying to uncover. Its very fascinating reading about the different tick species and their environmental preferences. I've found so far that it really depends on the tick species and the region of the world the are located. I'm really excited to see what are findings turn out to be and what kind of micrhabitats and environmental conditions the tick species' we're studying turn out to be.  I've also been going through pictures taken by some collegues last year in Utah and identifying the plant species in the pictures. Which has been a nice break from all of the reading and focusing on my specialities for a little bit.

      I've had a pretty busy week going through published academic papers to develop a literture review to find similarities in other studies and ours, focusing on tick species and their relationship with local vegetation and the microhabitats they live in. It's been really interesting seeing the ideas and experiments others have conducted and the conclusions they come to! It's been really fascinating reading up on the behaviour of ticks as they tend to act in ways I wouldn't expect them to. Its given me several ideas and has made me even more excited to start writing our research paper!

       The peak of tick abundance has come and passed this year. Now that the temperatures are averaging in the 80s/90s ℉ in northern Colorado it will be much harder to find ticks, so active tick surveillance has ended. We still have a passive tick station where the general public is able to fill out surveys and deposit any ticks that they may find on themselves during their hikes. This station is checked on a weekly basis, collecting any surveys and ticks, as well as refilling with surveys and tick removal kits. On another note, because we have stopped actively collecting ticks we are now combing through our data recorded from active surveillance. We're hoping to find some relationship between ticks, vegetation preference, soil temp/moisture, and other environmental factors. I'm also writing a methods for our procedure on marking ticks for our capture and release experiment, as well as going over other peer-reviewed papers that have conducted similar experiments to ...

 Hey everyone!  I'm Jon Wegryn, and I am currently working as a RaHP VEC intern at Colorado State University in the Center for Vector-Borne Infectious Diseases. The lab I'm apart of is studying ticks and tick-borne diseases. We're also conducting studies on the relationships of ticks and the understory vegetation they're found on, as wells as the microhabitats they prefer.  On a personal note, I'm a senior at CSU studying Restoration Ecology and will be graduating this fall! I have a great fondness for plants and have a fascination for all of the intricate parts that are important in ecosystems. I'm orginally from Michigan, but really love Fort Collins and its vicinity to all of the natural areas.