Hurricane Ritchie
Prof. Scott Ritchie visited Brian and the Fonseca Lab in mid August and left a “path of construction”! He spent a day in the salt marsh with Brian, Dina and Rick Lathrop (the PI of the NOAA funded salt marsh mosquito project) and back in the lab taught us how to collect and identify mosquito egg shells to assess marsh productivity. The next day, Dina took Scott and Brian to a town in Maryland developing a Citizen AcTS project where residents are deploying passive lethal oviposition traps (GATs) for urban Aedes control. The GATs were co-invented by Dr. Ritchie. Scott met the Mayor and marveled at the town’s lush gardens and tall trees, perfect to sustain large populations of Asian tiger mosquitoes.
You can read more about Dr. Fonseca, her early career, fears and successes and her discussion of the potential effects of climate change-driven sea level rise on salt marsh mosquitoes in the October 2016 issue of Princeton Magazine. Click on this