Rockies and High Plains Vector-borne Diseases Center Summer Internship

 Hi everybody!  This last week was great. Monday, IDing and catching up on lab stuff. Tuesday, UNM, processed samples and ran the Kingfisher RNA extraction. Wednesday, set every trap on the historic route! Thursday, ID all the mosquitos that came in from Buffalo Turbine, done by the other interns + Jess earlier in the week. Friday, we got to see the UNM people present during a poster session! Jeremy and Hailey are the two summer students who helped us a lot with the lab work, and they put together a poster summarizing the work they've done so far with the WNV testing. It was really cool! I have a group photo but it hasn't been sent to me yet and I didn't want to put off the blog post any longer.  I like doing the lab stuff, it keeps me fresh with more molecular work, and now that I know how to do it (and have a very solid procedure written by Jeremy and Hailey) it's fun to just sit and work. We have been seeing more vexans this week than previous weeks, at the beginning...

 Hi everybody again!  We have been continuing to roll out workplace flow improvements. The lovely Jess and Jessie worked together to make photo documents of each Buffalo Turbine site, so that the traps are placed in the same place every time, which is especially helpful when different people set and pickup traps. This afternoon I made a macro that can reformat our usual data entry method for batch uploading to VectorSurv, where people around the US can see our mosquito counts. Still have to enter our testing data, which I worked on last week and Morgan is doing this week!! Our plate last week went perfectly. The controls and standard curves performed just as they're supposed to. We did get some positive results but I believe those are being double checked before we release anything, so obviously I can't share what places and when. But! Results are coming in, and they're coming in with a short turnaround, which is great. I stayed in lab most of this week, doing auxiliary stu...

Hi all! I would have some really cool new mosquito photos to post but I got a new phone and the super-old Leica microscope photos app does not transfer, and the old one is erased already. Very sad! Oh well, I have some alternate things to show.  These last weeks have been *relatively* business as usual. Distributed 900 letters to houses in our Buffalo Turbing sites across all of us, me and Morgan did ~350 ourselves! Other one time operations plus the usual IDing. We had a trap with 642 Culex tarsalis alone!! A fair portion of our brain time at work is dedicated to finding more efficient ways to do the same old things... less work grabbing stuff out of the truck, best ways to carry things, ergonomics, etc. But I feel happy when we figure out a new way to do something. Maximum efficiency may one day be obtained? Have any of you seen Star Trek: Lower Decks? If you know, you know. We also have to do a lot of planning ahead of time to put five people across our four task categories! (La...

 Hello once again everybody! This is definitely the next blog post after Week 3, so it is 'Week 4'. That is how we're going to handle it. Work is anticipated to continue increasing in pace as we get more mosquitos. It rained pretty good these last few weeks, and it's looking like it'll rain tomorrow. Our historic route trapping is proceeding as usual but bug numbers are up! I found a bunch more fun bugs for my 'to pin' collection, and actually when I'm done with this I really ought to pin a bug or two. Work hours stop but bugs never stop!! Otherwise, we did our first Buffalo Turbine trapping run! Some kinks to work out, but coordinating multiple people prepping fieldwork is inevitably going to have some issues. I have collected traps from the South Valley sites, and tomorrow will collect the NE Heights, but I have not done setup yet. I've only got a week to estimate, but generally we have a few Aedes aegypti per trap with some houses having a ton! T...

 Hi again! It's later now! Anyways, work has been ramping up recently, as we prepare for our Buffalo Turbine experiment. If I haven't given enough detail before, I'll do so now: Buffalo Turbine is a company that makes a big machine to vaporize our insecticide product and fire it upwards, with the goal of having the mist arc over the front of houses and land in the backyard, where most container breeding occurs. Aedes aegypti are an increasing issue in a lot of ABQ, and they love small hidden bits of water in backyards.  The larvicide is VectoBac WDG, WDG being 'water dispersible granules'. It contains  Bacillus thuringiensis  subsp.  israelensis , a bacteria that's very toxic when ingested by the larvae. It's much safer for other organisms than a lot of other control options, and resistance is rare, especially considering our invasive Aedes are already resistant to most other mosquito control agents.  To make sure the Buffalo Turbine system is effective i...

 Hi again all! This is Ella. Work is all according to plan in ABQ. We RaHP VEC students have completed two trapping runs now. Plus some extra traps, which can be placed at citizen request. The trapping runs take all day, but it's not too bad with the AC, snacks, and friends in the car :) Most of the other work was IDing! There are a lot of bugs, but even more to come!! It is not peak season yet.  My favorite species (so far) is Culex tarsalis, because they have white vertical stripes on their legs. Very cute. There are also some other insects that come in as bycatch in the traps, and I've got a collection of those going so I can pin them. I am still learning how to take good photos with the microscope, but here's some teasers (they look a lot blurrier on the computer haha). I really like the combo of labwork and fieldwork. It gives a chance to have varied experience, and getting the entire picture of what we do really helps with science communication and public outreach, wh...

Hi all! I am Ella Eleven, I am a recent graduate from the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology with a Bachelor's in Biology. I am working with the city of Albuquerque NM and collaborating with the University of New Mexico to survey mosquito populations and test them for insecticide resistance and West Nile virus.  Last summer I did an undergraduate research program at the North Dakota State University doing lab and fieldwork with bees. Now I get to do lab and fieldwork with mosquitos! Very excited. I don't know specifically what I want to do after the summer but I'm looking out for any opportunities that come my way. So far we have done a little bit of identifying species but the main bit of work was setting up traps around the city and picking them up again. I aim to get some nice mosquito photos for my next post but right now here's me placing a 'gravid' trap: the standing dirty water attracts mosquitos wanting to lay eggs, and they get caught in the ...