NEVBD Summer Blog - Abby Golembiewski

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...

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...

I decided to combine my week eight and nine blog posts because week nine got cut a little short due to my trip to Alaska! These two weeks involved a lot of prep work for outdoor studies using Natular SC. We filled 15 white buckets that hold about 7-8 Liters of water because we wanted mosquitoes to naturally colonize the buckets that we would later treat. We placed each of the 15 buckets in different locations on the campus. Throughout this time, we also treated some abandoned guardrails that we found on the campus with different concentrations of Natular SC. The mosquito larvae that we found in the guardrails was mostly Aedes japonicus. The goal of the guardrails as well as the buckets is to create a separate probit analysis for outdoor studies. At first the concentrations we used were 1mL, 0.8mL, 0.6mL, 0.4mL, 0.2mL, and a control. However, after the first trial we realized that there was less volume in the guardrails than we thought, so the concentrations were more like 1mL, 1.5mL, ...