i don’t know how i feel about you. i like you yet i dislike you. you make my fat lip and hives go away, but you make my eyes close at inconvenient times.
so i had lunch with my mom today, and that was really nice. and she went back to work for a while and i was sitting in the lunch room by myself so i sang Part of your World as a form of self-entertainment a few times, which was a fun way to pass the time, but apparently people can hear you outside, which i was informed of upon my mom’s return… and there was a lecture in one of the conference rooms next door… woops.
mosquito freakout moment #9837265836: so to transfer the mosquitoes from their cages to the experimental setup/enclosure, we have to knock them out temporarily in order to move them in, and usually i freeze them for 30 seconds, dump them in, close it, and they wake up and fly towards the scents. the first 10 times i did this, i would always be shaking, and i think i had an unhealthy amount of adrenaline running through my body. thus, i would fumble and be inefficient, accounting for the other 9837265835 freakout moments. (passed out mosquitoes are like ticking time bombs, they can wake up at any moment and start flying around… looking for bloodmeals. aka… your blood.) so i am now comfortable with the freezing method, but my PI suggested that refrigerating them would be a better idea, even if we refrigerated them for longer, they would be less knocked out, so we would have a lower percentage of deaths. so i refrigerated them for a good 2 minutes, shook the container around to make sure they were totally out, and bring them over to the setup, open up the cage and start dumping them in. they weren’t very knocked out, because about 20 of them woke up and started flying around, so i frantically cover both the experimental unit and the cage, and look up in despair to see about 10 of them flying around the lab. great. just great. thankfully, after putting them in there, i was finished for the day, but my mosquito panick-attack recurrence was muy traumatizing.
and despite the irony of my bug-hater self working in a mosquito lab, i feel like in the midst of my panic and disgust during research, God has shown me a lot of His glory. mosquitoes are very complex organisms – especially with their crazy olfactory senses, and to think that people have been doing research for decades on a single species alone, yet we are so far from fully understanding how they work, really goes to show just how mighty our God is. and the fact that mankind cannot fully comprehend this little organism, and not only for anopheles gambiae, but pretty much for every creeping thing that creeps on the earth, really points to the power of God. it is so humbling to find out how complex creation is, especially because we take it for granted most of the time. bugs that we thoughtlessly smash are packed with God’s power. He is truly awesome.
