Week 4 (6/17/24)

This week has been a very Mosquito-heavy week due to a combination of many mosquito-focused interns were out most of the week and we had a short week with the federal holiday for Juneteenth. I was able to get a little more involved in the process for the mosquitos, and did a new, but simple task for of recharging all the batteries for the light traps. I was also able to get familiarized with the mosquito ID and counting process and realized I may not be as good at them as I thought, and I definitely still need the dichotomous key for the Mosquito ID outside a few species. Even after I ID species from a trap, my coworker Sammy checks to make sure I am correct. Admittedly, it was a nice break from the norm with going out flagging for ticks, being able to be in an air conditioned room during an especially hot week, but I am always excited for doing work outdoors with the tick flagging.

On that note for ticking, we only went to two sites this week, and they were far.  Huntington, and  on Shelter Island respectively. At both sites we were able to get all the ticks we needed from each in one trip, so we will not have to go back to these places. Going to Shelter Island was especially nice since I have not been before. All the animals there were incredibly docile from what I assume to be human feeding, so I had 2 or 3 chipmunks around me for most of the flagging. It was sort of cool to see these typically evasive animals up close but I also felt bad that they did not have their true instincts that they would in the wild. I also got to watch a Snapping Turtle cross the hiking trail, which was especially cool. 
Lastly, this week I was able to get ARCGIS working, and I did a test run of the nymph data to see what I could do, and I am glad to say that when I get a chance, I am going to make a few more maps to better display the data that has been collected the past few years.


Snapping Turtle on Shelter Island










Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Week 1 (5/28/24)

A lot happened in my first week interning here! I met my supervisors, Chris Romano and Scott Campbell, who showed me around the lab and assigned me a desk. I have begun to help set up for mosquito traps, and IDing Mosquitoes from the traps, and sorting them into vials to be tested for diseases. The amount of mosquitos coming in already for the start of the year has been nearly triple from years before apparently, so I was sort of thrown into it quickly and made a few mistakes, but there is always a learning curve for everything. For the Ticks, my coworker who collects them Steve, had me measure how long 20 paces were for me, so we could get an idea of how far I go when sampling ticks. Wednesday, I went with Steve in the morning to collect ticks in Brookhaven, which is done with a flag that gets dragged along the ground for 20 paces, and then ticks are picked up with tape or tweezers and put into a vial. Steve also showed me the life stages of ticks, being larvae, nymph, and adult, and ...
Read more

Week 7 (7/8/24)

Image
I have decided to shake up the way I do my blogs from now on, I always write paragraphs at the end of each day to go back to when  I write about my week on Friday. However I realized I could make these posts more in depth if I just use the paragraphs. Monday : We did not go out in the field today, me and Steve stayed in and we began counting the rest of the other species of ticks we have collected from the Deer Tick sights, as we only counted the Deer Tick Nymphs at each site to save time earlier in the internship. We got maybe 2/3rds of the way through before lunch. After, Chris had me teach the new hire, also named Michael, how to properly ID the ticks and the process of sorting and labeling the petri dishes. We started by going through sample from one of the Longhorn tick sites together, and I checked over his work as we went. After, me and Michael picked up where me and Steve were before lunch, and I showed him the process we go through for counting ticks. This is what we did f...
Read more

Week 8 (7/15/24)

Image
 This was my last planned shortened week of the internship, so this entry starts on Wednesday (7/17/24) Wednesday: Today I started with starting a new GIS project I gave myself, where I am making a heat map to show how close areas of the county are relative to the actual sampling sites. This was inspired by my own experience, because the site for my town is 20 minutes from my house, and I do not even live in the biggest town. This is a map I unfortunately cannot release on here. After spending about an hour trying to do this me and Steve had to get out and hit the weekly surveillance sites because it is supposed to rain overnight and possibly into the day Thursday. We got to Longhorn site 1 and Lonestar site 1. Each site was on the opposite ends of the extremes in terms of the quantity of ticks we found at each site. At Longhorn site 1, we each easily got over 100 ticks each in under 20 samples. We left this site pretty quickly and after sampling at Lonestar site 1, we collected ma...
Read more