Friday was my chance to show of my mad skills as tick hunter, and show the new RUMs research students how the Kiptopeke field site works. Despite the copious amounts of ticks in one transect, six people at one site is a little much, so we worked to collect 'bonus ticks' from areas outside of our transects. It was interesting to see how much I have learned and how my tick hunting skills have improved, especially my search image to determine the specks of dirt on the flag from the deceptive crawling specs of dirt which are actually nymphs. All and all this excursion was a success and there were no casualties.
Meadow at Kiptopeke, it was beautiful in the breeze
After a busy week of meeting new people, learning about PCR, and many aspects of 'tick-ology' I had a much needed weekend of relaxation, cookies, and lobster-like sunburns. On Saturday I went over to Amy's and we made lactose free dark chocolate chip cookies. They were not most visually appealing cookies, there may have been an over site with the size of the cookie sheet and the size of the oven...but! cookies are cookies and they were delicious none the less.
Dark Chocolate Chip Cookie spectrum of medium well to well done
On Sunday we went kayaking at Back Bay. It was quite a lot of fun, if I do say so myself. I love kayaking and being out on the water,despite my inability to tread water when swimming (one day I will conquer that). The weather was amazing, and we ended up kayaking just over 2 miles. I got to see two muskrats, a water snake (species unknown), a water moccasin, and a ton of invertebrates. Amy and I joke about attaching flags to our kayaks to catch ticks, but we will save that biological nerd moment for another time. After succeeding to not flip the kayak the day was successful in fun and relaxation. And lastly a reminder, Maine sun and Virginia sun are very different, and sunscreen most definitely needs to be reapplied or it will result in a lobster-like appearance.
Picture off of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, we go over it to get to Kiptopeke the tunnels still amaze me.
Responsibilities, for each site we visit, were determined in our class during the morning after our statistics lesson. Today, we hit Kiptopeke again, planning around the rain we are supposed to get later this week. It was just three of us, but I probably got close to 200 Lone Star nymphs. All in all, it was a good tick day.
Dermacentor variabilis, size of a dog tick vs my hand
-Lexi
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