Week 11 (8/5/24)

 Monday: I started the morning with going back to entering data into the excel spreadsheet. I was also able to finally fix the mistake in the equations that has been bugging me for the past week. After a little while me and the other Michael went to two sites, Longhorn site 2 and our Deer tick site in Babylon. It poured over the weekend, so they're weren't many ticks in general but it was nice not dealing with millions of larvae on our flags after one or two clicks. The other site regularly does not have any ticks because there are no deer, and not many rodents, so this was quite literally a walk in the park (I'm sorry). When we got back I went right back to entering the data in excel and fixing the mistakes the last intern had made. I also organized the bags we put our vials in at the end of sampling at a site. These bags have all the weather and distance info written on them, and they are kept for for a little while. The last intern had messed up transferring data in some spots which created some discrepancies in the excel spreadsheet, and was annoying to go through a pile of ziplock bags over and over. When I got all the discrepancies out of the way I highlighted a few more that were not quick fixes, such as tick counts not written down anywhere, and put in the rest of the data I have.

Tuesday: Today started with doing some odds and ends on my computer before moving to working with Mosquitos for the morning. I again only worked on gravid traps just to help take a small part of the load off the other interns that work with the mosquitos full time. There wasn't really to much in most of the traps that I happened to end up working on, so I did not really mess up all that much. After lunch I switched gears and began a small project graphing the population of Longhorns from our surveillance sites, which I am basically done, but I am missing some data from site 1 as some visits have not been put in test tubes yet. After, me and Steve showed the new entomologist, Molly, the freezers and where are the supplies for the various tick-related tasks are. We also gave her a sample to sort and showed her how we sample. At the same time me and Steve were putting some of the Longhorn Site 1 ticks in vials. This will be something I continue tomorrow and I should be able to complete the small project I mentioned before on Thursday.

Wednesday: I started this morning with doing some more work on the GIS tutorial power point. After finishing this I went and sorted ticks that steve collected yesterday, and tubed them. At this point Molly and Steve got into the lab and we tubed the remaining 4 samples from Longhorn site 1. After lunch I had to measure 20 steps for Molly and one of the Mosquito counting interns, Ashlie. Molly of course will be going on sampling trips in the future and needed that to get done, and Ashlie had gone before, so we had to get hers so the equations in the excel spreadsheet would include her. To finish the day, there is a box with vials of ticks from the old intern that had to be double checked. It was totally unsorted and many counts were wrong. We are not done going through that box yet but we should be tomorrow.

Thursday: This morning I did not go to my computer, I got right to work double checking the vials that had to be double checked. This got finished in about an hour and a half. I then had to go back to all the tubes and write down the counts on paper so I could put them into the excel spreadsheet at my desk. There were a few mix ups during this, which got sorted out but ended up taking way longer than expected. I then put the info from the paper into excel. After lunch I went back to the boxes of vials, as they had to be integrated into the sorted vials from the sites that I had visited. After I finished this I started working on a bit of the new excel project Chris wants be to do with mapping out the life stages of Longhorns. I didn't get to far though because I sort of restarted, as I was doing amount caught per minute but Im going to change it to distance.

Friday: Today I started with going back to the Hlong populations project for just an hour. Then at 9:30 I did a crash course on ARCGIS for Michael, Chris, and Molly, and had them test out my tutorial I made on power point. Once I completed my crash course and they started trying to use ARCGIS for themselves, I started collecting some more data from 2023 for the Hlong project and answered any questions. After a while I started sorting the extra sites vials in their boxes by date collected, which took me until lunch. After lunch I went back to the Hlong project where I have completed it, but I cannot post it unfortunately. By this point I had gotten thorough feedback on my tutorial so I am working on making it better for them before I leave.

Comments

  1. NEVBD summer 2024 internshipAugust 13, 2024 at 10:23 AM

    Very cool all the work you're doing with ARCGIS!! also, it's scary how many ticks you've been finding...

    ReplyDelete

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 for t
Read more

Week 4 (6/17/24)

Image
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 S
Read more