While attending the Entomology meeting, we took a quick trip to Lester Park to check out 490 million year old fossils of Stromatolites, structures created by cyanobacteria (embedded in the black rocks)!

Maya and Samantha delivered a poster presentation at the Entomological Society of America's annual meeting in Saratoga Springs, NY (and did an amazing job!). The poster was titled "Operation BOOT&S: Borrelia burgdorferi OspC Variants Over Time & Space". Here they are with their poster and with Fran Tick, a friendly blacklegged tick who infected the conference with joy.

I delivered a research talk titled "Associations between understory plant community composition and blacklegged tick populations in southern Vermont forests", describing our ongoing study into the role of invasive plant species in maintaining blacklegged ticks and pathogen transmission in Rutland county, Vermont. Kristen Ross, a Biology professor on the VTSU Castleton campus, was a co-author on this talk.