Day Two

Day Two 9/5/08 Collection Day One

I love this hotel! I feel like a princessJ Last night we got in late, I stepped into the marble tiled lobby and knew this was going to be amazing. My room is amazing!! Apparently they are out of the smaller rooms at the moment, so I got a “suite” which means there is a couch and chair, and a king size bed. The air conditioner works, and everything is immaculate and I am being seriously spoiled!

Today began with a delicious breakfast in the restaurant downstairs. Black beans are typical for a breakfast food, plus tamales of various types and fruit and fresh squeezed orange juice, ect. We headed over to the laboratory, and after only about an hour and a half we had gathered all of our supplies and pinned down a driver and we were off. The first stop was Rio Florido. We stopped at a local elementary school where they had a couple of water tanks, and a couple of discarded toilets and a random metal drum thing. We found skeeters in all. Then we stopped at a house across the street. Upon removing the wooden cover of one water tank, about fifty mosquitoes flitted out…needless to say, we hit the mother load!:)

The next stop was a town on the ocean! I didn’t even know we were so close and would be going to the coast! It’s beautiful, big waves and palm trees and a delicious breeze off the water. We sampled in a cemetery. It’s customary to leave pots of flowers on the tombs of relatives; they gather water and hatch mosquitoes. This cemetery had actually been moved a few yards because the ocean has started to eat away the shore and apparently graves were in danger of getting sucked away (not sure if any actually did…) Mexican cemeteries are beautiful though, full of color and big tombs, not a somber place in the least. Toward the end of our collections there, some locals stopped to chat and gave us each a giant coconut with a straw stuck in the top to sip the coconut milk. So fresh! Someone climbed up the tree to get them for usJ My Spanish incidentally isn’t as bad as I thought…still pretty bad, but I ge the gist of most conversations. I have a really hard time speaking and putting coherent sentences together, but by the end of the trip I know I’ll be a lot better already. Dr. Black says I have to take a Spanish class next semester (along with advanced vector biology or something like that).

Our last stop was another town quite a ways away. We passed huge banana plantations along the way. I sampled in another cemetery while some of the others went to a few houses. Not as many larvae to be found here, but plenty for our purposes I gather. I was so tired by this point; good thing I brought along some snacks (Caley be proud).

We then headed back to the laboratory, not for a lunch break, but to pick pupae (the ones about ready to emerge as adult mosquitoes). The next step will be to knock out the adults long enough for us to sort out the species we want, then blood feed them and gather the eggs after they lay. We have seven more sites to collect from. If we got three today, I imagine we can do at least that many tomorrow and the day after and I think there is one site that takes a whole day. But, it sounds like we won’t have to collect for the whole ten days. Yay!!! It’s tiringJ Plus, I want to go shopping for some of the Mexican silver that I LOVE!

Tonight is dinner at Janeans(sp?) house. She’s the one I don’t really like. Oh well, at least she’s feeding us and possibly a few cervezas??

Hopefully I’ll be able to post this tomorrow at the lab! I miss you all so much even thought I’m having an absolute ball!

Ciao,

Megan

Pictures: The Center (where our laboratory and insectary are located), Dr. Black Mike Megan and Antonio getting ready to head out to collect, two places we find mosquitoes (old toilets and cemeteries), the ocean!!!