Chase Bond is channeling Ghostbusters. She has a jerry-rigged vacuum in one hand, connected by a thin, black cord to her backpack.
"We have made that joke many times," she said.
Instead of sucking up ghosts in the city, Bond is in Brasher State Forest, crunching through layers of fallen twigs and dried pine needles. She’s hunting down something even scarier to most of us: bloodthirsty mosquitoes.
Bond walks around traps set up in the woods. They're black collapsible laundry baskets and small wooden boxes that are spaced out every 10 feet.
She sneaks up behind one, sticks her vacuum in, and snatches up the bugs inside.
"This is a really good day, you’re in for a treat!" she said after pulling her vacuum out of a basket.
After she clears each of them out, Bond swiftly screws on the lid. The mosquitoes get fresh air through the fine mesh bottom.
"You can actually hear them buzzing around in there if you listen really closely," she said, holding up a quart container filled with frantic insects.
Bond is an intern on a team of scientists in St. Lawrence County that’s capturing mosquitoes. It’s part of a new public health effort to understand which mosquitoes live here and what diseases they carry.
New mosquito surveillance
In 2024, six horses in St. Lawrence County were infected with Eastern Equine Encephalitis, also known as Triple E. It was the most of any county in New York State last year. All of the horses died.
"This happened in a fairly concentrated time frame," St. Lawrence County Public Health Director Erin Streiff said.
It’s normal to have a couple of Triple E cases each year, but usually, they’re spread out over weeks or months, Streiff said.
"So, the thought was if it's a lot in a short amount of time, maybe there's really high viral activity in the mosquitoes," she said, "which would then potentially be transmitted to humans through mosquito bites. We just weren't sure exactly what the risk to human health was."
Streiff said officials initially considered spraying insecticides over large areas to kill as many mosquitoes as possible.
But that could affect all sorts of insects. Plus, they didn’t know where to start, Streiff said. There wasn’t a specific area where they knew for certain the infected mosquitoes were coming from.
"We decided that we needed to take a more studied approach and determine exactly where the higher-risk mosquito pools might be," she said.
More from Vermont Public: Vermont is searching for EEE, one mosquito at a time
Some other counties in New York have been surveying mosquito populations for decades. St. Lawrence County hasn’t had the money or staff to do it before.
But thanks to funding from New York State, the county’s public health department started this summer.
Public Health teamed up with scientists from SUNY Potsdam, Clarkson University and SUNY ESF. The group put out traps at three locations in the county: Brasher State Forest, Upper and Lower Lakes Wildlife Management Area near Canton and the Clarkson Woods in Potsdam.
So far, they’ve found 26 species of mosquitoes using three different kinds of traps.
Clarkson University biologist Tom Langen said it’s pretty surprising.
"The data looks pretty different among the three sites in terms of what mosquitoes are there, what are the most abundant species," he said.
Knowing where certain species live could help identify potential hotspots when something like Triple E or West Nile Virus pops up, he said.
Sorting through mosquitoes
Chase Bond sorts mosquitoes into their species. Photo: Catherine Wheeler
Once the living mosquitoes get back to the lab, they’re flash frozen.
After about 20 minutes in the minus-80-degree-celcius freezer, SUNY Potsdam student Chase Bond dumps their stiff bodies out onto a white sheet of paper.
Bond and her fellow interns sort through the thousands of mosquitoes they catch, she said. They’ve spent hours staring through microscopes looking for the tiny differences between species.
They didn't start as experts, she said. The team went to SUNY ESF for a crash course in mosquito identification.
"After we came back, we managed to form a faster way to do it," Bond said. "But before that, it was really tough because you're basically looking at these little microscopic hairs that are like behind a microscopic hole on a microscopic insect."
They have to work quickly because any virus that could be in the mosquitoes degrades the longer they sit at room temperature.
Bond moves her tweezers between the mosquitoes with precision, separating them all into piles. She taps a counter to keep track.
Bond is only after the female mosquitoes — those are the ones that drink blood.
"You can tell the males from the females because they have really fluffy antennae," she said. "You can see right there, it has really fluffy antenna. That is a male. So, I'm going to put it over here and count it."
Then she starts dividing them into species.
"Maybe this could possibly be a [culex territan]. So I'm going to put them over there," Bond said, as she carefully set down the mosquito on one side of the paper.
Once all the mosquitoes are sorted, they go back into the freezer until they’re shipped to the New York State Department of Health’s lab in Albany for disease testing.
"We put them into these little vials that have a metal BB in the bottom. That's how they sample them. So they shake them up and crush the mosquitoes," Bond said.
How surveillance prepares us for climate change
The team’s work has already proven fruitful. Earlier this summer, a mosquito sample collected from Upper and Lower Lakes tested positive for West Nile Virus. But that’s the only detection of a mosquito-borne virus so far this year.
SUNY Potsdam biologist Rob Snyder said this work is about establishing a baseline of what kinds of mosquitoes live in St. Lawrence County. He said it will help public health determine what diseases could be here now or in the future.
"We're just interested in the diversity of mosquitoes," he said. "Like how many, what's the seasonality, the diversity of the mosquitoes here, and how are they going to change 10-20 years from now?"
A lot of that change could be driven by a warming climate. Warmer and wetter weather will be hospitable to more and new kinds of mosquitoes, potentially bringing new diseases.
Mosquitoes are the world’s deadliest animal, killing hundreds of thousands of people every year, according to the Centers for Disease Control.
Surveillance helps us know what risks lie ahead, St. Lawrence County’s Public Health Director Erin Streiff said.
"It's just a little bug, and they seem so innocuous, but if you look at all of the things that they've transmitted to humans from malaria and just everything, I think we need better solutions," she said.
There are things we can do now to protect ourselves from mosquito-borne illnesses, Streiff said.
The Triple E vaccination for horses is effective. While that doesn’t exist for humans, she said, people can try to avoid mosquito bites as best they can. You can wear bug spray, long shirts and pants and stay inside during dawn and dusk when mosquitoes are most active.
This story was originally published by North Country Public Radio. NCPR's climate change and health reporting is made possible through the generous support of Margot and John Ernst.
