Week 3 (6/10/24)

This week was go go go with collecting ticks in the field. The window for Deer Ticks nymphs is starting to close, and what little there was to begin with is starting to disappear. So this week I went out all five days to various sites including: Our Deer Tick sites in Brookhaven 3 times, our Deer Tick site in Smithtown, and one of the Longhorn sites, which I will designate as Longhorn site 1. I got very good with being able to identify ticks habitats, but I am still working on noticing the Deer Tick nymphs in the field. I have gotten very good at doing tick ID in the lab, and I am able to go much faster and get it done in a timely manner. I have finished my first project on excel for now, I would like to use GIS but the IT department has not responded to me. I have started another small project where I am calculating how many mosquito samples per square miles we are able to do, compared to other counties, and comparing that to their populations. The last minor thing I did this week was completely resort the Tick petri dishes in the deep freezer, which were a total mess last week from rushing to count the Deer Tick Nymphs so we could know if we had to go back to certain sites. I have organized them by the amount of Deer Ticks collected per site. I have also sorted out the bags of vials of ticks yet to be sampled with colored rubber bands, depending on what they are sampling for. I again have not been able to do much this mosquitos at all this week since there are so many Ticks that need to be collected.

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