My name is Danica Shannon. I'm an undergraduate honors student in the Ben Matthews mosquito lab and I'm also a project assistant for the Spencer entomological collection at the Beaty Biodiversity Museum. So I initially took a neurobiology class that Ben Matthews was teaching; a third level course. I reached out hoping to get more involved in research during my undergrad degree. So I initially went in with a really strong interest in mainly the neurobiology aspect but then upon working with Dan on some of his projects I also became really interested in mosquitoes and their ecology in general.

The project that I'm working on in the Ben Matthews lab is called the Ow! What Just Bit Me? project and the aim of it is to fill some gaps in knowledge in terms of what we know about mosquito species distribution in British Columbia and there's a few different ways you can kind of approach these gaps in knowledge. You can do modeling, so looking at specimens that we've already collected where they are, what kind of environmental factors they're living in and kind of extrapolate that out to see where they could potentially be. You could also use Museum collections like the one at Beaty Biodiversity Museum in order to see historically where we found certain species. And then you can also focus on the collection effort side.

This initiative was started by Dr. Dan Peach who was a postdoctoral fellow at the Ben Matthews mosquito lab previously. And he sent out a call through the media for citizen scientists to catch mosquitoes in their backyard or camping, hiking wherever they may be. When they slap them, put them in an envelope and then mail them directly to us. And we had a really incredible response with over 500 envelopes that we received, with thousands of mosquitoes inside. What we're doing with that information is extracting their genetic material in order to determine what species they are to hopefully fill in some of those range questions that we still have.

So there's a few reasons why we want to know about this. The first would be from a public health perspective some species of mosquitoes--the females -- take blood meals in order to get the nutrition they need to develop their eggs. When that happens, if they feed on someone who is infected with a pathogen such as West Nile or malaria, that species is compatible for they can pick that up and then transmit it to the next person upon a subsequent blood meal. So knowing where they are within the province can help in the case of any potential disease outbreaks. Because knowing where that vector is can help kind of determine how it might spread.

From an ecological perspective mosquitoes can be important for us to learn more about for a couple of different reasons, one being how their range distributions are being affected by climate change. So as temperature is changing, precipitation is changing, more urbanization is occurring, seeing if that's causing any sort of change for their range at all. In addition to that, targeted control efforts can be aided by this kind of information. So mosquitoes have important roles besides just being disease vectors in terms of being food sources for other animals like frogs, birds, other carnivorous insects, also in the detritus that they consume.

In addition to females taking blood meals during their lifetime to develop their eggs, they also feed on flower nectar in order to gain energy. Males pretty much only feed on flower nectar throughout their lifetime and species that don't feed on blood at all, that's exclusively what they eat. So this introduces another ecological role for mosquitoes as they pick up pollen grains from the flowers that they're feeding on and transfer them between plants. So when we're having these controls in terms of restricting mosquito populations, having them being really targeted to specific species that we know can lead to these outbreaks of diseases can help you know maintain the populations that are beneficial to ecological systems without wiping out all of the mosquitoes in an area. Even though we know mosquitoes as mainly being nuisance pests and having important impacts on public health, they're also really important ecologically, have different roles in our environment and are hopefully something that we can also appreciate.