Week 8 (7/15/24)

 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 maybe 40 ticks in total, with at over 25 samples each. When we got back from these sites we ate lunch and then counted the ticks we collected, along with finishing an older sample from east moriches that was half way done. When this was finished I moved on to continue the GIS project, but hit a bit of a roadblock. One of the sites is not in the Suffolk County parks file for GIS. I cannot figure out how to create my own polygon for the park. I went and did some research, after much searching online, I finally found some hope in a paper that directed me to email someone who works at a university. The paper is relatively new, published in 2024 so I hope this means the contact may still work in the same place.

A flagged sample from one of our sites today.


Thursday: Today was fairly uneventful, as it rained hard last night and as a result there would probably not be many ticks to collect. The most unusual thing to happen today was actually running into a Peacock this morning that runs around the Suffolk County Offices campus, he has apparently been around for a little while. I started with trying to tackle my new ARCGIS project, as I had received the information I needed for one missing site, however it does not seem to be working properly, and so I had to troubleshoot that for most of the morning until Steve got to work. When he got here we spent the whole day inside counting the ticks from the surveillance sites, of which are now completely done. Steve said he would start the double check on the Deer Tick sites, I thought this part was already done by us last week, so he is probably confused and we will get it sorted out Monday when Chris is back from vacation. We finished all the surveillance sites around 3, so with an hour to kill I decided to keep troubleshooting ARCGIS. Unfortunately it still is not working and I cannot figure it out for the life of me.

Friday: There is a Microsoft outage today, the mosquito traps are completely done, and we have gotten as far as we can with the ticks. I did do as much as I could, going to our Longhorn site 2 with Steve. He left right after we got back, and I ate lunch, then sorted and counted the ticks we collected right after. Since that I attempted to look for one specific tick that we may have that my supervisor wants, and tried ARCGIS in safe mode but it was super slow. My last, new long term task given to me right at the end of the day is to sort a drawer of ticks in vials, as they are a total mess and Scott wants to know what is in them. I started with one specific box that is supposed to contain unknown ticks, but has turned into a miscellaneous box as I found out. Most of the vials on record in excel were missing and the vials that were in the box were not on file. I want to fix this next week given the time.

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