So it begins.....Tires across Mississippi

We've started our summer long sampling of tires in Mississippi as part of my NIH funded research.  We will be sampling at least 7 sites scattered across the state to answer a number of questions related to the tire mosquito fauna.  Our first two sites are located in Ohlo and Jackson.  Both are commercial businesses that have good sized tire piles.  At each of these sites we are collecting data on not only the mosquitoes we encounter, but other organisms in tires (other invertebrates, bacteria, and protozoans), and other factors that are likely to influence the tire community (e.g., tire size and volume, canopy cover, pH, nutrients).  

One of our tire locations (Ohlo, MS).  This location has a number of small to large piles scattered around auto salvage.

This was our first trip (of 3-4 to each site), and at each site we are collecting data from about 40 tires.  Although that may seem like small potatoes given the density of tires available, we have some specific criteria that we need each tire we select to have in order to answer our questions.

Francis (in white) and Alisa sample tires at our Jackson, MS site.

For instance, because we wish to understand some of the factors responsible for the distribution of mosquitoes in tires, it's important that most of our tires contain mosquito larvae.  We also are interested in understanding how nutrients affect the presence of larvae, so we need to have the major types of detritus present (i.e., animal, leaf).   Once we identify a tire, we begin taking data about the tire environment, and we conclude with removing the contents.  We've found that cutting a hole in the sidewall works best.

A view from the top!....of the large tire pile in Jackson, MS.

This project should yield a rather large data set (perhaps > 800 tires) and will represent one of the largest and most complete investigations of tire food webs in existence.  I'll be posting more updates as we hit other sites and learn more about the tire fauna, and occasionally I'll throw in some of our other moves (arriving in the post that hurts the most):