Rockies and High Plains Vector-borne Diseases Center Summer Internship

This week I began actually trapping mosquitoes. It became incredibly obvious that mosquito season is finally starting when looking at the data from this week compared to last week. Our data jumped up from just catching about a few hundred last week to >10,000 this week! I’m really interested to compare next week to this week to see if there's a drop off or continued growth. The data from this week is also significantly higher than the historical data. Almost X3 more mosquitoes than this time last year. The Culex % is also about X4 higher than last year. 2023 was historically a bad West  Nile year all over Colorado, and while our overall mosquito numbers are still less than 2023, the Culex % is much higher. This is probably a good indicator that this is going to be a busy summer. I'm also getting to set some more traps in some of the more rural communities in Weld county! Not only will we be able to provide surveillance for towns that currently don't do any, I'm getti...

Hello again!  I spent this week in a whirlwind. Fellow RaHP-Vec interns and I placed mosquito traps around Fort Collins on Monday, sorted caught mosquitoes Tuesday, and conducted insecticide resistance bottle bioassays with them on Wednesday. We repeated the process on Thursday and Friday. I think I have looked in the eyes of more mosquitoes than people this week, which is a totally normal experience, right? We collected mosquitoes at the Environmental Learning Center in Fort Collins, on the shores of a small lake. Emerald Cordova, Grace Doerner, Isabelle Byland, and I set up 5 traps each time. We captured plenty of mosquitoes, which we then buckled into a makeshift car seat (see picture below!) It was rewarding work; we got good yields each time. Even better, I got to spend time outside. We brought a butterfly net and caught dragonflies. I used a larval scooper to find rocks and empty snail shells in the shallows of the lake. It was 80 million degrees out, but it was worth it. I h...

  This week things really ramped up! I’ve never worked with mosquitoes before (only mice/rats and cell cultures) so this was a big change for me. I got to go inside the CSU insectary for the first time! It's such a cool facility, and the rearing process for mosquitoes is so much more in depth then I expected. After what I learned this week, it's hard for me to believe mosquitos can hatch in the wild.  Outside of basic handling and safety training I ran my first bottle assay.  I did this with Oliva (also a RaPH VEC intern) to test insecticide resistance. The difference between susceptible mosquitoes’ vs wild mosquitoes’ knock down time is staggering.One thing that surprised me was that the CDC protocol for bottle assay testing recommends a different method of exposure than what would happen in the field/real world. However Dr. Saavedra-Rodriguez (who’s the PI) is having us do both methods. I really love that she's doing both types of testing because I think it's really c...

 Hello!  My name is Olivia Martinez, I am a RaHP-Vec intern at Colorado State University this summer. I just graduated with my bachelor's in Biomedical Sciences, concentrating in Microbiology and Infectious Disease. Since my freshman year of college, I have wanted to go into biomedical research. For the past two and a half years, I conducted research in mosquito egg-laying behavior in Dr. Rebekah Kading's lab. I'm excited to apply the skills I've learned to RaHP-Vec, and to learn so much more! After this summer, I will be spending a year as a research associate in New York City, still studying mosquitoes! I am planning to apply to microbiology Ph.D. programs this year, focusing on vector-borne diseases with a One Health approach. I want to study pathogens, the vectors that carry them, and how their transmission affects people. Outside of the lab, I love to read nonfiction, care for my forest of houseplants, watch random documentaries, and do anything creative. Above all...

 Hello everyone! My name is Olivia Martinez, and I am a RaHP-Vec intern in the Center for Vector-borne Infectious Diseases at Colorado State University. I am in beautiful Fort Collins, a city currently being barraged with rain. That can be good or bad; more rain means everything is green. I love watching Fort Collins wake up from winter. The bad side of rain: more mosquitoes. Although, for this group, that has its bright side. More mosquitoes means more to study! This summer, I am studying insecticide resistance in wild-caught and lab-reared mosquitoes. So far, I have focused on  Aedes aegypti, the species infamous for the transmission of diseases like dengue, yellow fever, and Zika. We are testing several species of mosquitoes from around the country to see if they are resistant to certain insecticides. To do this, we are using bottle bioassays (see picture below!). The test is simple, but very effective. We place about 20 mosquitoes in a bottle that has been coated inside wi...