Some Tennessee teachers are back in their classrooms now, where they'll instruct students about entomology and geospatial analysis by using mosquitoes as part of their lesson plan. The University of Tennessee Institute of Agriculture recently held the first of three training sessions for educators, how teachers and their students are learning the science of mosquitoes and how they'll contribute to future research. More now on megabytes. Hello, I'm Charles Denny.
Ready to hatch, but not babies we'd want to cuddle. These teachers are looking for places where mosquitoes lay their eggs. Educators set out traps around the UT Ag campus and four days later eggs were everywhere. It's part of a training program funded by a workforce development grant from USDA NIFA called mega bytes.
That stands for medical, entomology and geospatial analysis, bringing innovation to teacher education and surveillance studies. Paula Deaver teaches in Union County. So I plan to use this as a platform all year long in the curriculum where I can talk about how to use microscopes and we can look at the larva and then we can go on and we can map where we found all of the mosquitoes and then I'm going to have students do some PSAs, public service announcements and put those on our Facebook to make people aware of what they can do to help with the population of mosquitoes in the neighborhoods. The first class was held during mosquito awareness week, but the teachers are far from done.
This is a year-long academy, concluding on World Malaria Day in April 2020. Mosquitoes can transmit dangerous pathogens west Nile in addition to Valeria. In Tennessee mosquitoes also spread La Crosse in Cephalitis, the most common pediatric mosquito-borne disease in the US. Tanya Hinky is a Knox County teacher.
Honestly my biggest goal as a teacher is to show how science is real and anything I can learn anything I can do that gets the students outside. So many students these days spend most of their time indoors and getting them outside because that's where the science happens and with every class I teach the mosquito-borne illnesses, climate change, the spread of mosquitoes into more and more areas for longer periods of time. I can tie this into any of the curriculums I teach. The teachers will instruct students about mosquito biology and ecology, potential careers in entomology and the science classes will collect mosquito egg data for the UT Institute of Agriculture and local health departments, leading this program Becky Trout-Frixil with UTIA.
Yeah, so what we really wanted to do, aside from just training where people and getting them interested in entomology and GIS, we also wanted to kind of do this give and take relationship which we have right now. So we've been giving them this training. The teachers are going to go back into the classroom and do 10 weeks of mosquito surveillance with their classroom. The students are going to actually develop a scientific experiment which you know if replicated correctly and we can do this right, could be a publishable piece of data that's all driven by the students in their classroom and then the teachers are actually, you can think of as the PI running that program.
So they're learning science and they're doing it in the classroom. Trout-Frixil is a UTIA endomologist and coordinator of the Megabytes Academy. She's not an alarmist by any stretch but is concerned about mosquito population spreading disease. She says key here is education and prevention.
Within the past 20 years our mosquito species have changed. Not necessarily the individual mosquito has changed but we've had two new invasives mosquitoes come to the U.S. You know we think of ancient tiger mosquito and the Asian rockville mosquito. These two mosquitoes interacting with our native mosquitoes are probably what's causing this not just change in lacrosse and encephalitis cases but also the change in what we've experienced.
Trout-Frixil calls this educational effort community driven surveillance encouraging a younger generation to be curious about entomology and learn its impact on public health. So really when it comes to vector born diseases preventing a bite is all it really takes to prevent a pathogen from being transferred. So one of the things that I'm really interested in this is how can we prevent bites by happening by just increasing awareness of a pathogen in the area. Mosquitoes are responsible for more than half a million deaths worldwide each year.
The USDA grant runs for two more years. Other contributing partners include the UT departments of geography and education. The goal of megabytes is to train a future workforce and also build awareness of insect related pathogens, an effort to promote good human health and decrease mosquito populations. Thanks for listening, I'm Charles Denny.
For more real-life solutions provided by the UT Institute of Agriculture go to our website at ag.tenacy.edu.