Summer 2024: NEVBD Blog

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...

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...

This week was majority spent in the field collecting ticks. I have gotten much better at identifying tick species on the flags, and in particular spotting the Deer Tick Nymphs, which are what we aim to collect. It was nice being able to see parts of Long Island I have not been to before, and being outside in general for most of the day. In the lab I have gotten much quicker at using the tweezers and microscope to sort the ticks by ID, and almost all the time I did not spend in the field this week was identifying the ticks we have collected, since we are sort of backed up right now. I have not done much with the mosquitos this week, only working on IDing those for a few minutes on Wednesday. My side project of making some Lyme Disease data presentable got feedback on monday, and so I have been chipping away at it slowly each morning, before most people are at work. I find excel to be sort of like a puzzle, so I find it fun and it helps wake me up a little. I hope to have this revised ve...

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 ...