The Tick Blitz is here! I started getting collection sheets from the volunteers via email starting Monday afternoon, and received the first few envelopes of vials later in the week. The collection sheets are where volunteers record the conditions they were collecting in (i.e. temperature, cloud cover, habitat type) as well as the geographical coordinates of where they were and how many ticks are in each vial. This data will be compiled alongside the tick identification data.
On Thursday, Jake and I went out to tick drag in a few Ithaca locations so that the project would have some data for Tompkins County. We stopped at the F.R. Newman Arboretum, the Allan H. Treman State Marine Park, and the roadside near the Abbott Loop Trail in Danby State Forest. Although we didn’t find many ticks, the outing was very useful for me because I hadn’t been tick dragging before. Jake taught me how to drag and look for paths through brushy areas that could indicate wildlife traffic which would be a favorable spot for ticks to hang out.
There weren’t many tick envelopes to go through on Friday, so Brady and I helped Jake sort a shipment of mosquito larvae into containers with 200 in each. We pipetted droplets of water containing a few larvae into empty containers to make counting easier, then added a liter of distilled water and some liquid food into each one.
