Skip to main content

Week 6: (7/8-7/12)


This past week was very busy but very exciting! I was able to attend a field trial on Tuesday of this week in Mercer County for a new product from Valent BioSciences. This experience was awesome, and I learned a lot! When I first got there, I helped to make 200 post treatment cups to put mosquitoes from different reps of the trial in. Then, I aspirated mosquitoes for the first time! We separated mosquitoes (albopictus, pipiens, and field collected mosquitoes) from different counties into “tambourines” for three different distances from the sprayers and three different trials. There were also tambourines that acted as controls for the trial. At first, aspirating mosquitoes was a little difficult for me, but then I got the hang of it. Then, we waited for the weather. At 9:30, the trial was ready to start since the ground temperature was cooler than higher in the air. After each rep, I helped to aspirate the mosquitoes from the tambourines into the post treatment cups that we created earlier in the day for observation. By the time the three reps were complete, it was about 12:15 am. Although it was definitely a long day, it was one of the best days of my internship so far! It was a really cool experience, and everyone I met was extremely kind and had great stories. Below are some pictures!!












Mosquitoes: 

In other exciting news, I was also able to complete our third bioassay this week! The results from this one were not perfect, but we were still able to take things away from it. The larvae that we used were too old, so about half of them did not feed on the larvicide. Looking at the data without the computer program, the data does look as though it will be linear and follow the trends of the other bioassays, but we will look closer next week. We plan on starting another run on Monday since we could receive better results with more larvae! Additionally, I restarted the colony this week. Our colony was gifted to the field trial, so I hatched a new egg paper and moved larvae into the bug dorm. I also created new test solutions to be used for the bioassay next week. Lastly, I learned how to sort gravid trap nets for record! There were a few nets that had been in the freezer for over a week, so we did not send those to the lab, but it was good practice for me to sort and identify, especially because I have mostly worked with larval stages! 


Black Fly: 

I also went to a few small creeks this week to take some black fly samples. The flow of all of these locations was very low since Hunterdon has not received much rain the past few weeks, but we were able to find small numbers of black fly larvae! I took these samples on Thursday, and went through the samples on Friday to sort! 

I also attended the career seminar zoom this week. I found it interesting to see a path that someone could take in order to get into this work, so I thank NEVBD-TEC and Charles Abadam for setting that up!! I am loking forward to starting another bioassay next week as well as looking into the results we have received so far.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Thanks & Summary

I wanted to thank everyone who made this internship possible for me! Thank you to NEVBD-TEC and the staff there including Emilie M Gray and Emily Mader. Thank you to Tadhgh Rainey for hosting me in Flemington! “Dyakuyu” or дякую to Jack Petersen for guiding me through the world of Aedes albopictus, Natular SC, and of course Ukrainian, Polish, etc. I also wanted to thank the rest of Hunterdon County Vector Control, Nick, Marty, and Lexi, for teaching me all about treating the river, gravid traps, light traps, etc! I truly enjoyed all aspects of this internship from lab work on mosquito larvae to black fly field work. I thought that I would give a quick summary of everything I learned this summer! I completed 4 bioassays on Aedes albopictus larvae with different concentrations of Natular SC in 250mL of water. We collected data to create Probit analysis curves using computer software to estimate an LD50 (ours averaged around 0.5 to 0.7 microliters/Liter). We then started taking these es...
Post a Comment
Read more

Week 10: (8/12-8/16)

This summer truly flew by as it is somehow already the last week of my internship! As I mentioned in my last post, while I was gone, some trials were run on the buckets that we had set up right before I left. Most of the buckets were naturally colonized like we had hoped, but a few needed an egg paper. During this last week, we ran a final trial on the last three remaining buckets with concentrations of 0.3mL, 0.4mL, and 0.5mL as well as a control. After 24 hours, we took note of some live larvae in the two smaller concentrations but no live larvae in 0.5mL. This week I also got to see different types of larvae because they were being shipped to Florida. One larvae I saw was Psorophora ciliata, which was very interesting because they eat other mosquito larvae. I actually got to see an actively feeding larva with another mosquito in its mouth. Then, later in the week, I saw an adult, and it was so large compared to the Aedes albopictus that I had been working with throughout the entir...
Post a Comment
Read more

Welcome to my Internship Blog!

 Hello! My name is Abby Golembiewski, and I am a biochemistry student at Villanova University. This summer I will be interning with the Hunterdon County Mosquito and Vector Control Program in Flemington, New Jersey. I am excited to gain experience in field and laboratory work while studying black flies and Asian tiger mosquitoes!!  
Post a Comment
Read more