Week 7 (7/8/24)

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 for the rest of the day. This video is a timelapse of of how I count the ticks, I put two rows of five together, so there's less room for error.

Tuesday: In the morning I worked on some of the excel projects after getting feedback from Scott about them the other week, I mostly worked on the nitpicks and small changes, as most of this is just refining what I have done. There is a much larger part however, where I have to compare the infection rates between adult and nymphs by town, so 10 graphs, 1 for each town. After I did some work with the Mosquitos, which went with only the the mistakes of missing a few heads. Then after this, me and Steve went to two of the weekly site visits, Longhorn site 1 and Lonestar site 1. It was very humid, so ticks were more active than normal, allowing us to have a solid sample size this week for these sites, unfortunately that also meant they were more aggressive, as I found 4 crawling on me today which is a new personal best. After we got back I went to go count some of the samples from Deer Tick collecting, only to find the rest had been counted by someone at some point? It was confusing, but a nice surprise. I shifted gears and began working on IDing some of the monitoring sites, as we are sort of backed up there. The new Michael had some free time helped, which was good practice for him. I sorted todays ticks from Longhorn site 1 and we got halfway through another bag from the site from a month ago. 

Wednesday: I started this morning with doing some work on the excel project. Along with all the minor details, Scott wants me to add graphs showing the change of percent of infected nymphs and adults for each town as I mentioned above, so it may take awhile to get done. After I worked on this for around 30 minutes, after I briefly helped with mosquito sorting. There were barely any mosquitos in the traps today, so going through them was not to bad of a task. When Steve got to work, we worked together on starting the double check on the tick counts, and also wrote the counts down in my notebook, we did this the entire day and got through 8 or so site visits (Counts are separated by site visit, not location, so there are still 6 or 7 to go though). After we finished what we had taken out, I was forced to move on because the freezer the ticks are kept in got to warm, and opening it would not help. I put the ticks we had ID'd in a different freezer and moved on. I did some organization of the work place and chipped away some more at the excel project town graphs before going home for the day.

Thursday: Today I sat down at my desk and did a little work on the excel project again, and I am slowly figuring out the graphs for each town's deer tick infection rates. Excel seems to have weird quirks that keep messing things up, so unfortunately has been slow going. After I did this for about an hour and a half me and Sammy went to our Longhorn site 2, I did not think there would be many ticks at all out due to the rain we had overnight, so it was a great surprise to be finding at least 3 ticks on most of our flags. Even at one point I got 10 adult Longhorns alone! After getting back, I continued where me and Steve had left off with the remaining Deer Tick sites we had to double check. The first one I looked at had been miscounted and I had to redo the count, which ended up having 96 Lonestars. The rest looked okay with species ID and their counts. This whole time I have been writing down all the site count info in my notebook, so tomorrow I will combine each sites totals in the back of the notebook.

Flag from our Longhorn site 2 there are about 10 ticks you can spot if you look carefully.

Friday: I started today by trying to add up all the sites totals I have written down to make sure my totals match up with what we actually have. This will help me know if I missed any, and I will have to go back and find the ones I did not do. So of course, the first site I tried to add the separate visits up from did not seem right, so Monday I am going to have to sort things out as I did not really have time today. After I worked on my excel project for awhile, and after the rough experience on Thursday, I am happy to report that today was smooth sailing. I was able to fix the graphs from yesterday, and I actually ended up finishing all 10 new graphs. After finishing this I went and sorted what I thought was the rest of the surveillance sites that have not been done already. However one escaped, because it was halfway done from earlier in the week, sitting with the finished petri dishes. I had some time after this and customized my workspace where I count and sort a little more to put everything in arms reach, and I started utilizing the drawer at my desk. After this we had our second seminar as a part of the internship program, we had a guest speaker from Suffolk, VA who talked about how he was able to expand his department and offered insight on what working long term in the field is like, along with what makes applicants in the field stand out. I this found very helpful, so thank you if you are reading this!