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Crow’s Nest: Tick research continues

May 23, 2011

University of Pennsylvania researchers have returned to Crow’s Nest for another season of field study on ticks, Lyme disease, and the small mammals that are an alternate host for the disease. They are working on how to vaccinate a wild population of white-footed mice so that the mammals can’t pass the Lyme disease spirochete, thereby interrupting the bacterium’s life cycle.

Here researcher Jamie Mackay shows kids in our WebWanders program the traps they use to catch mice and feed them the vaccine in a bait.

Jamie is a doctoral candidate at the University of Auckland in New Zealand who is spending the summer working on this project along with two other researchers in addition to project manager Godefroy Devevy. The project is part of Dustin Brisson’s lab at Penn.

If you see the researchers in the field feel free to ask them for an update. Because they are interested—and out in the woods every day—they offer another perspective of nature at Crow’s Nest.