Summer 2024: NEVBD Blog

 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...

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...

This week is a short week for fourth of July, and I am taking a personal day off on the 5th, so not to much happened. On Monday we went to our sites in East Hampton to finish the samples off before the Deer Tick nymph season slows down to much. We got the ticks we needed, just in time for it to pour for the whole ride home. There was a bunch of traffic so that is all we did on Monday. I got back, did a few odd chores around the lab such as folding the ticking flags before the day ended. Tuesday was entirely opposite from Monday, and I was in the whole day sorting and counting mosquitos. I have the gravid traps down to a science, but I keep messing up the backend with entering data into the computers and today a sample may have gone missing but we do not know, and could've been a zero. From now on if I get any empty traps I am going to mark them as such in my notebook just to be sure. Lastly Wednesday Me, Steve, and the new lab tech hire, another Michael, went to the site in Longhor...

We are coming super close to being done with our first round of collecting Deer Ticks. On Monday me and Steve and Jules went to our sites in Riverhead and Southold one last time, putting the totals for both sites well over 100. The next day me and Steve went to a site in Brookhaven which we needed 8 more to get our total, and we struggled to find them over the course of an hour. The last sites we need to go to now are in the Hamptons, which will be a long drive next week. There is another site we sometimes go to but it has such a small amount of ticks that it is hardly worth going to try with all the other sites that also need collecting, and have more potential. After these are completed, I believe we just have to do the scheduled site visits that monitor Lonestar or Longhorn populations at Longhorn sites 1 and 2, and Lonestar Site 1 Unfortunately, we were down two interns this week that worked on Mosquitos, so I had to step in and once again, besides site visits, this week I mostly I...