First Tennessee trapping session

ARDC (Tennessee) update

Our locations are now Airforce-approved and the grids are in!



With a little help from a friend ...

Scenes from the Gauntlet...Ft. McCoy Update

SRS Update!

Hey all! We had a good week trapping at SRS. We still are waiting for our third site to be approved (hopefully next time!) so we ran our 2 full arrays. The lizards we are catching have nymphs and larvae now and the few mammals we caught have very very low numbers of ticks on them at all. And guess what! WE FLAGGED LARVAE! Woot woot! It didn't seem like we were hitting larvae nests but getting a few here and there. I think we flagged about 70 all together.
As for our attempts at baits: Howie was right, our sunflower seeds started to sprout. We tried the lard, sunflower seeds, peanuts and oats blended and made into little balls and the ants LOVED it. We shook those out and the second and third night we used just rolled oats. Those were the nights we actually caught mammals so we are going to stick to oats. So far our trapping suggests low densities of small mammals. We'll see if that changes the longer those traps sit there and are "prebaited".
That's all for now!

Project t-shirts

Heather has come up with some design options for a project t-shirt ("Tick Chick" is a third possibility for the front).

If you are interested in obtaining one of these tees, contact Heather: hedward2@utk.edu

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How NOT to catch a mouse ...

............................... http://vimeo.com/12166950

Greetings from Ft. McCoy Wisconsin

Hello!!!! A few pics from one of our sites we like to call "Stonehenge"

Hi Y'all!
We have been busy minions up here in Wisconsin. Very little time to enjoy the cheese or the microbrews :)....maybe in a few weeks.
Just a quick update: we have all 3 sites approved and flagged (marked with grid flags). Most of our mammal traps are out and we will be working diligently on the other components the rest of the week and into the next.
Tick population density: Holy Blood-sucking arthropods Batman! Yesterday's site (Bravo-4) had a density of 5.4 nymphs per meter. We did 630 meters total yesterday using Howie's suggested method of walking along the transects and checking at each trap station. Gena dragged and I flagged and the winner was........Flagging coming in at 20nymphs/90meter drag transect (average). This beat out dragging by a 2.3 nymph advantage as dragging brought in 16.6 nymphs/90 meters at the B-4 site. In addition, my flagging brought in a larval mass, which I confirmed as I. scapularis back at the Headquarters microscope.
Today, at our "Stonehenge" site, dragging/flagging efforts were less productive (0.75 nymphs per meter) and coming in with equal (yes, equal) nymphal collection success. Today we dragged for 720 meters total. I was able to run through 2 seperate larval masses at this site. We are getting ticks of all 3 stages at this point. Adult populations appear less robust than nymphs, and in our small observation time, it looks as if larvae are just beginning their ascent to power in the land.
In other news, we will be using a 12' aluminum flashing. This cost us $28 a roll at the hardware store and was the most cost-effective choice for us. I spoke with Russ and he thought this height would work fine for our site.
Hope site preparation is going well out there!
Quest On!
isis

Trailcam photos from SRS, May 2020

You have been warned ...