As West Nile infections surged, these scientists faced an unprecedented challenge

Anna Wanek has visions of mosquitoes dancing in her head, even when she’s asleep.

“I have a recurring tarsalis dream of just seeing it through a microscope,” she said, referring to Culex tarsalis, a small brown mosquito that harbors West Nile and several encephalitis viruses. As a surveillance manager for Vector Disease Control International Inc., Wanek spends much of her time in a laboratory identifying the various mosquito species buzzing around the greater Denver region.

She is among a number of Metropolitan State University of Denver graduates and current students who have been inspired by a Biology professor known as “the Mosquito Man.” And they are venturing onto career paths that protect Coloradans from threats posed by disease-carrying insects and inform residents about those threats.

That work was especially intense last year as unprecedented rainfall caused mosquito numbers to balloon “out of control,” Wanek said. Colorado had 634 cases of West Nile virus, compared with 207 cases in 2022. The state Department of Public Health and Environment reported 51 deaths last year due to West Nile virus, compared with 20 in 2022 and 11 in 2021.

“It was completely unprecedented, but my team stepped up to the plate,” she said.

To document the extraordinary mosquito season and the effort to track it, Wanek co-authored a paper submitted to the Journal of the European Mosquito Control Association that recounts how Vector Disease Control field employees, most of them MSU Denver Biology students, coped with the massive surge in the mosquito population following last year’s rainy spring.

The company’s surveillance staff included 12 students and two recent MSU Denver graduates who logged more than 3,300 person-hours over 14 weeks, the most spent on mosquito surveillance in the company’s history, the paper said.

Bob Hancock, Ph.D., the professor with the Mosquito Man moniker, joined Wanek in writing the paper, along with MSU Denver graduate Kelsey Renfro and Adjunct Professor Michael Weissman, Ph.D., another faculty member who piqued Wanek’s interest in entomology.

Vector Disease Control recruits college biology students for seasonal surveillance work because they are “talented, flexible and driven employees who viewed their jobs as a career step,” the authors wrote.

“Hancock wanted to do a paper based on the actual people who do the surveillance work,” said Wanek, who like many of his students refers to the professor by his last name only. “I really liked the human side of it. A lot of people don’t think about the work that goes into a project like this.”

Vector Disease Control employees set and collected mosquito traps throughout metro Denver and brought them back to the VDCI lab, where they counted how many of each species had been trapped. “A given trap might have 10 mosquitoes,” Wanek said. “Some might have 1,500.”

That she and her fellow MSU Denver Biology grads are so passionate about their work isn’t surprising, considering their mentor.

Hancock’s enthusiasm for mosquitoes is infectious — as are many of the viruses they happen to carry.  The assorted species he studies can transmit diseases to humans, including yellow fever, dengue fever, Zika and West Nile virus.

That hasn’t stopped many of the students who have worked in Hancock’s Auraria Campus lab over the years from sharing his research interests and pursuing careers in the field. In fact, he says, many of the professionals working in mosquito control in the Denver area are his proteges.

“Our overall impact on mosquito control in Colorado along the Front Range is second to none,” he said.

Hancock has always tried to integrate teaching and research. After President Janine Davidson, Ph.D., arrived at MSU Denver in 2017, she paid a visit to his lab, where he was raising colonies of tropical tree-dwelling mosquitoes belonging to the genus Sabethes.

“I said, ‘This right here is a gold mine of undergraduate research projects,’” he said. Sure enough, several of Hancock’s students have since made significant discoveries involving Sabethes.

For example, Connor O’Brien-Stoffa, a 2020 MSU Denver graduate and former assistant in Hancock’s lab, is preparing to submit a manuscript to a scientific journal describing the mosquitoes’ nose-biting behavior. Recent MSU Denver grad Nicola Zaragoza spent her time in Hancock’s lab studying the oviposition (egg-laying) behavior in Sabethes mosquitoes.

Meanwhile, Hancock and other faculty members are turning MSU Denver’s Biology program into an important pipeline to careers with the region’s mosquito-control entities.

They are important roles, as mosquito species such as Aedes aegypti are invading the United States as they never have before and wreaking havoc on human health, Hancock said.

“When (students are) coming out of these classes that I teach, we have these relationships,” Hancock said. “They’re going to work and representing MSU Denver in a lot of ways. They have that common college pride, and now they’re taking care of the health of the Front Range. The benefits are tremendous.”