Week 8! UM Long-Term Surveillance, 1st Instar Larvae, and Mammal Trapping

 Week 8 has now come to a close and I am excited to share some new information with you all. This week there was 3 main tasks; completion of the UMaine long-term surveillance transects in Wells, my first solo experience setting gravid traps for the Pesticide Resistance project, and aiding as a scribe for a small mammal trapping project. 

University of Maine Long-Term Surveillance

To start this post off, there was lots of work to complete for the UMaine project. Before I can begin to sample the area, it is helpful to use flagging tape to mark out the transects that I will be dragging in. There is 10 transects that consist of 100 meters where every 10 meters the flag must be checked for ticks. To streamline this process, each 10 meters was marked and labeled so that anyone could perform this surveillance in an effective fashion. The time-consuming aspect of doing this, was that the previous start and end markers I placed were not universally 100 meters. Members of the UMaine cooperative extension had marked out the placement of the transects via GPS coordinates and it was part of my job to find these places and visually mark them. While I gave this my best attempt, some were more accurate than others, and some had not been measured properly. Fortunately, I had help from another member of the lab, prompting this process to run smoothly. It is helpful to have multiple people in this set up process as one person can look at the GPS while the other uses their pace to place markers every 10 meters. In the end, we had to move some of the transects around due to habitat and the functionality of the GPS file being questionable since we used Google Earth to access it (cellular reception was lost). Had we been able to use a Garmin device with the locations pre-loaded this may have been more effective, but nonetheless we felt confident that the locations we marked will work out great. Next week I will return here to sample the transects and record the 0-, 50-, and 100-meter longitude and latitudes for where the transects now lay. All in all, this took a large majority of one of the days but in the grand scheme of things will be incredibly helpful for surveillance in the future. 

 

Pesticide Resistance

The pesticide resistance project is now in full swing, and I was able to start placing and picking up traps this week. On Thursday, I drove to the campus of the University of New England, where I found a parking lot surrounded by trees. Placing 5 hay-broth infused traps on level surfaces that were shaded, I left these overnight. The nutrient broth was deluded to about 10% using tap water, and a gallon of this liquid was placed into each trap. I returned on Friday to find that there were egg rafts deposited in the liquid. In collecting these, I was able to salvage 10 in total. After picking up all my supplies from the area I promptly transported the samples to the lab so that they could be accessioned. These Culex larvae will sit on the lab bench over the weekend and by Monday they will be what is considered 1^st Instar. 

Hay-broth infused gravid trap placed
on campus of UNE

Earlier in the week I was shown how to identify these larvae under the microscope distinguishing Cx. pipiens from Cx. restuans. All 1^st instar larvae have what is called an egg breaker, and this egg breaker looks like a black dot in the middle of the specimen’s head. The difference is that Cx. restuans have a hole or a noticeable “dent” in this same location whereas, Cx. pipiens do not. I will find out this coming Monday how many of the egg rafts are which species, and we will use this information to separate the samples so that they can be sent to Cornell for testing. 

 

Mosquito Larvae and Egg Raft collected from
the week previous

Small Mammal Trapping

Lastly, I was recruited to and happily accepted to help in small mammal trapping efforts. As one of the projects that I know the least about, I was excited to learn some new skills and help as much as I could. On Wednesday, a lab member and I went to the Wells Reserve to place 80 small mammal traps, 40 in native habitat, and 40 in invasive habitat. Placing bait in each trap it was our goal to capture voles, so that we could look for the presence of ticks. This reminded me a lot of the goal for bird-banding, and it was really interesting to see the many ways that surveillance of ticks can be perused. The next day we returned to check all of the traps. Unfortunately for us, the goal species was not in abundance as the majority of the traps that had captured animals had mice inside. We did however capture one vole, so the applicable data was not entirely a loss. We were still able to process some of these mice as well, so that I could get a feel for the data recording step, but like I mentioned, the voles are the goal. I did learn however that voles and mice may behave different when being processed for ticks. While both can be described as docile animals, voles when being held will actively try to escape and may even attempt to bite. While it's good practice to take caution when handling any animal, voles may require an added amount of attention. 

Mouse collected and being processed for ticks

Thanks for tuning in again to hear about my week, I will write to you all again after week 9 of 10 is complete!