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...

This past week has been a big one for both learning and progress in our West Nile Virus surveillance work! I’ve gotten much quicker and more confident with mosquito identification. After several weeks of practice, the process feels a lot more intuitive, which has been especially helpful with the high trap counts we’ve been seeing. We also started to see positive results for West Nile Virus. Initially, we were pooling our samples into three groups: one for all of our north sites, one for all of our south sites, and one for Kestrel Pond (which continues to have very high numbers). All three of those pools tested positive, and a few weeks earlier than last year. Because of this, we’ve now changed our approach and are separating out the pools by individual site. This will allow us to pinpoint exactly which locations are testing positive and better target our response efforts. However, one of our traps failed this week and wasn’t able to collect any mosquitoes, a good reminder to double-c...

Last week, I was made aware of an interesting trend. Evidently, since 2015/2016 there has been an increased pervasiveness in the Anopheles mosquito throughout the Animas River Valley. In years past, there had been perhaps one to two samples per season containing the Anopheles mosquito. Now, we average an Anopheles sample roughly once per week. This trend is a concerning one, due to the Anopheles mosquito boasting the highest victim mortality rate of any species. They prefer to hide in the grassiest, most shallow edges of aquatic environments. This makes them difficult for both us and potential predators to find them. The Anopheles mosquito larvae is distinctive in that they, at first glance, appear to be nothing but a bit of flotsam on the surface of the water. However, upon closer inspection and stimulation they begin to exhibit customary (though slightly modified) larval movement. Once adults, they are identified by the position of their abdomen; when landed, it is posed at a nearly ...

Summer is in full swing and so are the mosquitos. In terms of my work at CSU things are going super smoothly. I feel like thanks to all our sorting days I'm much more confident in my ability to species mosquitos. I didn't realize just how many mosquitos CSU tests for Larimer county. It's a really cool partnership that I wish was more common. Emerald and I also got to do some outreach at a couple of different community centers, which was really fun! Everyone is really nice and wants to learn. However they also asked a lot of questions that I couldn't answer, especially about ticks.  I'm hoping I can learn more about them in the future so I'm more prepared next time. As for my work at Weld this summer has been really weird when it comes to mosquito numbers. Culex % in Weld County is the highest it's been in the last 5 years but overall mosquito numbers are down. Now it seems like we are in a wait and see state to see how these odd mosquito numbers will affect ...

  Th e first week was spent mostly trapping wild mosquitoes at a cute little area called magpie meander and taking care of pupae from Wyoming. We have been using public VDCI data to trap in areas with high numbers of mosquitoes that are mostly Cx . Tarsalis. Personally, I have been begin ning the genomics portion of our research. I have performed DNA extractions of the tarsalis mosquitoes ensuring they are separated by dead, recovered, and alive. The intention of collecting this data is to compare the genetics of dead tarsalis (least resistant) to recovered tarsalis (more resistant) then, alive tarsalis (most resistant).   Th e second week has been spent collecting valuable control data. We have raised three lab colonies: Culex tarsalis, Culex pipiens, and Culex quinx . Each received from the CDC as control lab colonies. Due to the colonies being bred within a lab environment exclusively they do not (should not) exhibit resistance to the extreme that wild mosquitoes ...

  This week was exciting, with a combination of both some old and new work. Again this week, I worked with Olivia on sorting mosquitoes and conducting bottle bioassays with Etofenprox. Fun fact: While sorting mosquitoes, I listened to one song 22 times. Our traps this week caught a high yield of Culex tarsalis , which is what we wanted. After getting a majority of Aedes vexans from Dixon Reservoir, we hoped the following trapping sites would yield more Culex tarsalis to test. Outside of the lab, Grace invited me to travel to Nunn, Colorado, for an outreach event. There, we talked to a group of senior citizens about West Nile Virus and tick prevention, then gave them informational flyers and bug wipes. I really enjoyed talking to all of the attendees in a smaller, more intimate environment. I have also been working on some items to construct a “Grab n’ Go” outreach event kit. As I am doing work on the kit, it has also been helpful to attend outreach events to see what really enga...

Hello,     We have been working hard on analyzing the results for our tick study from last summer. As mentioned before, we are studying the correlations of tick presence and numbers with different vegetation types in Colorado wild areas. I have been modeling our data with some different parameters to find the greatest fit and to see where these correlations are significant/strongest. Nothing is final, but some interesting patterns and outcomes are worth noting.       We have decided to use a Zero-inflated Generalized Linear Mixed Model with our data, which splits the results into two categories, one for the correlations with the presence of ticks alone, and one for the correlations with the number of ticks. No matter what I have done so far in the modeling, one variable has a very strong correlation with tick numbers: time of year. This was to be expected; we saw a drastic drop in abundance as the summer progressed last year, and it's nice to see that this ...