KINGSVILLE (July 17, 2024) — Texas A&M University-Kingsville graduate student Rachel Walters was selected to attend a two-week workshop conducted by the U.S. National Tick Collection 5th Annual Tick Workshop last month at Georgia Southern University in Statesboro, Georgia.
Walters, a Master of Science student in Range and Wildlife Science, applied for and was granted an invitation to the workshop, which provided beneficial for her upcoming master’s thesis prescribed fire impacts on ticks and tick-borne diseases in coastal South Texas grasslands.
“The workshop was a very exciting opportunity for me to get more background on ticks and tick-borne diseases,” Walters said. “Before starting on my master’s project, I had never worked with ticks before, so the workshop helped fill in some basic tick knowledge and allowed me to work with specimens from the U.S. National Tick Collection.”
There were a number of topics covered at the workshop such as tick systematics, classification. behavior, anatomy and surveillance methods. It also featured a visit to the U.S. National Tick Collection, and some field collecting experience.
“For the first week, we got to practice tick identification using ticks from the National Tick Collection,” Walters said. “This was super helpful since I'll have to identify the ticks we've collected in the field. The workshop also provided a lot of tick identification keys. There isn't a great one for this region, so I'm working across multiple keys that they've provided to identify the ticks I'm finding here in Texas.”
The second week of the workshop became more lecture-based, with researchers and professors focusing on tick-related topics.
-TAMUK-
