Today at the Field Station we met Emily; she is the mosquito lady
of Nantucket. She is sitting at her desk in the lab using tweezers to sort
through different kinds of bugs, pulling out only the mosquitos. Emily wanted
us to help her sort out the bugs from the mosquitos. There are beetles, moths,
flies, some bees and wasps, and of course there are lots of mosquitos. To catch
the mosquitos she uses a dry ice trap. Dry ice lets out CO2 and to find humans
the mosquitos use CO2 also. The traps were set in different habitats of the
island because there are many
different types of mosquitos; some areas are the marsh, grasslands, forests,
and ponds. Emily's trap works well and
caught many mosquitos. She was catching all the mosquitos to see if any of them
carried any diseases that were harmful to humans like West Nile Virus. If any
of them carried the disease Emily would alert the public of Nantucket about the
disease carrying mosquitos and the kind of habitat they like to live in. I
enjoyed meeting Emily today because she is so friendly and she is helping
protect the public of Nantucket one mosquito at a time.
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