“The projects this year run the gamut, from fungus and bats, to lichens to blue-green algae, to an invasive tick, to evolution in lichens, to pollination trials, back to bats and how they are affected by light, and finally diversity in forests,” summarized Thomas Daniels, Ph.D., director of the Louis Calder Center, in his opening remarks. 

In 20-minute-long presentations, seven Fordham students spoke about what it was like to explore the sprawling 113-acre biological field station through CSUR: a 21-year-old program that allows Fordham undergraduates to conduct independent research projects with a Fordham faculty member and a $5,000 stipend. In wooded areas, Ian Sokolowski, FCLC ’20, foraged for Asian long-horned ticks with a white corduroy cloth and forceps. In the middle of Calder Lake, Julia Sese, FCRH ’20, retrieved water samples and analyzed algae blooms. 

Several of the students also shared how their projects began. Joseph Laske, FCRH ’21, recalled the day he found a wild bat while cleaning a Harlem park with members of the Students for Environmental Awareness and Justice club at Fordham. 

“I was raking some leaves, and I heard a squeak. I looked down, and there was this bat curled up on the ground in a fetal position,” recalled Laske, an environmental studies student. 

Concerned about the wild creature’s well-being, Laske snapped a picture of the animal and sent it to his professor, Craig Frank, Ph.D., who studies the effect of white-nose syndrome in bats. Could this bat be affected by the same disease, Laske wondered? 

It wasn’t. But his email sparked a conversation with Frank that would lead to Laske’s application to the CSUR program. For 10 weeks, Laske looked at how white-nose syndrome, a fungal disease, grows at different temperatures and how one species in particular, the Eastern small-footed bat, is able to resist the dangerous disease. 

“Bats are important pollinators [and pest eaters]. They contribute a huge amount to the agricultural industry,” said Laske, who plans on working as a technician in Frank’s lab this fall. 

The keynote address delivered by Alexandria Moore, Ph.D., a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow at the American Museum of Natural History and adjunct professor at Columbia University, also explored science research. Most of her speech spotlighted her work in coastal wetland restoration. But the rest focused on her identity as a queer person of color and how it informs her work as a scientist. 

“What I have talked about so far today has been sort of referencing gaps: The first one is a gap in our knowledge of how ecosystems work and how we can do a good job at recovering them; the other one is a gap in our understanding of the differences between people and the importance of those differences that people have,” Moore said. “What I do now in my work is combine all of those things together …. What I do at the museum is I ask the same kinds of research questions that I asked at Yale. I ask them in areas where we haven’t asked them with people who never really get to be part of those conversations.”

Sitting in the audience were eight local high school students in Fordham’s Science and Technology Entry Program (STEP)—an academic enrichment program for underrepresented youth from 7th to 12th grade—who presented their summer research posters that afternoon. 

The year before was the first time that STEP students participated in the program. One member of the inaugural cohort will be a first-year student at Fordham College at Lincoln Center this fall, said Patricio Meneses, Ph.D., who helped bring the students to the annual program. 

For DaiJon James, a rising senior at Equality Charter High School in the Bronx, the six-week research experience clarified his career path. It showed him that he wants to become a scientist—a first for his family, he said. But what surprised him this summer was the level of respect and collaboration that he experienced with his Fordham mentors, including Rachel Annunziato, Ph.D. 

“It was kind of like …  jarring because as a teenager, you don’t ever really expect to be given the kind of opportunity to show what you know,” said James, who studied how to best use teletherapy to improve post-procedure care for teenagers with liver transplants. “Working with Dr. Annunziato changed that perspective for me.” 

This summer, another student—Alexa Caruso, a rising senior at New Rochelle High School in Westchester County—performed data collection and analysis on perovskites, a promising material in solar cell research. 

“With the people and the resources that we now have in this day and age, we can definitely make something useful,” Caruso said. “What I did, it’s gonna help the future one day.” 

Photos by Bruce Gilbert

Six distinguished faculty members were honored on March 13 for their achievements in securing externally funded research grants at the third annual Sponsored Research Day on the Rose Hill campus.

The University Research Council and Office of Research presented the Outstanding Externally Funded Research Awards (OEFRA) to recognize the high quality and impact of the honorees’ sponsored research within the last three years and how their work has enhanced Fordham’s reputation—both nationally and globally.

Faculty were honored in five separate categories and were given awards by Jonathan Crystal, Ph.D., interim provost, associate vice president, and associate chief academic officer.

Humanities: George Demacopoulos, Ph.D., professor of theology and the Father John Meyendorff & Patterson Family Chair of Orthodox Christian Studies, and Aristotle Papanikolaou, Ph.D., professor of theology and the Archbishop Demetrios Chair in Orthodox Theology and Culture

Demacopoulos and Papanikolaou, co-directors of Fordham’s Orthodox Christian Studies Center, shared the award for the Humanities category. Demacopoulos has received awards totaling $928,000 in the past three years, while Papanikolaou has received a total of $888,000. Last April, they secured two grants totaling $610,000 that will be used to fund a multiyear research project devoted toward the issue of human rights.

Interdisciplinary Research: Su-Je Cho, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Childhood Special Education at the Graduate School of Education.

Cho, an expert in the field of special education, has received two external grants totaling more than $2.7 million from the U.S. Department of Education and other foundations in the past three years. Her interdisciplinary project will produce approximately 40 professionals in special education and school psychology, which are the greatest shortage areas in the field of education.

Junior Faculty Research: Sarit Kattan Gribetz, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Theology

Gribetz has received six external grants totaling $55,000 from the prestigious National Endowment for Humanities and other foundations in the past three years. Her research focuses on the history of time in antiquity and the important role that religious traditions and practices have played in the history of time. In 2017, she received the Manfred Lautenschlaeger Award for Theological Promise, alongside nine other young scholars, from the University of Heidelberg in Germany.

Sciences: Steven Franks, Ph.D., Professor in Biological Sciences

Franks has received five grants totaling more than $5.3 million from the National Science Foundation in the past three years. The results of the studies funded by these grants have been published in 17 peer-reviewed scientific publications since 2016. The papers, which are in high impact journals such as Evolution, Molecular Ecology, and American Journal of Botany, have been widely cited. His work has helped to advance our understanding of responses of plant populations to climate change and the genetic basis of these responses.

Social Sciences: Janna Heyman, Ph.D., Professor of Social Service and Endowed Chair of the Henry C. Ravazzin Center on Aging and Intergenerational Studies at the Graduate School of Social Service

Heyman, who is also director of Fordham’s Children & Families Institute center, has received 10 grants totaling more than $3 million from a variety of external foundations in the past three years. Last year, she co-edited, along with Graduate School of Social Service Associate Dean Elaine Congress, D.S.W, Health and Social Work: Practice, Policy and Research (Springer, 2018). She has taught social work research, advanced research, and social welfare policy courses in Fordham’s master of social work program, as well as policy implementation in the doctoral social work program.

Organized by the Office of Research and the University Research Council and sponsored by the University Research Compliance Council and the Office of Sponsored Programs, the daylong event featuring a keynote speech by Denise Clark, Ph.D., Associate Vice President for Research Administration, University of Maryland at College Park.

A forum of science researchers featured Thomas Daniels, Ph.D., director of the Louis Calder Center, Deborah Denno, Ph.D, director of the Neuroscience and Law Center, Silvia Finnemann, Ph.D., director of the Center for Cancer, Genetic Diseases, and Gene Regulation, J.D. Lewis, director of the Urban Ecology Center, Amy Roy, Ph.D., director of the Pediatric Emotion Regulation Lab, and Falguni Sen, Ph.D., director of the Global Healthcare Innovation Management Center.

Daniels also added that while Zika virus is a mosquito-borne illness, “there is a case of what looks like sexual transmission – one partner became infected and seems to have passed the virus to his partner via intercourse.

“Another case confirmed virus in a man’s semen, also suggesting sexual transmission is possible. We don’t know how rare it is but the fact that it seems to have happened at all is noteworthy. Also, if an infected person is viremic (lot of virus circulating in the blood) and is bitten by a competent vector mosquito (an Aedes species that can transmit the virus), the mosquito can acquire infection from the person and then transmit it to another host. This may be aiding the spread of the virus during an outbreak. So while it’s not direct transmission from one person to another (as the sexual transmission is), we are involved in the cycle,” he said.

The Tick Index measures the risk of being bitten by a tick in Westchester County and the surrounding area. To be specific, a blacklegged tick, also called the deer tick (and in some parts of the country, the bear tick). And if you’re bitten, and don’t remove the tick very quickly, you stand a pretty good chance of contracting Lyme Disease.

The blacklegged tick, Ixodes scapularis, has a complicated two-year life cycle that revolves around feeding on the blood of animals. It’s the whole bloodsucking thing that makes the tick a vector, or carrier, of diseases like Lyme (and babesiosis and anaplasmosis, among others). Ticks are born without the bacterium that causes Lyme Disease, Borrelia burgdorferi. When they feed on animals and birds that are “reservoir competent,” meaning they can carry and transmit the Lyme bacterium, the ticks acquire it. If you provide the tick’s next meal, it can return the favor by infecting you with the disease. (White footed mice, chipmunks and robins are reservoir competent; gray squirrels, deer and opossums are not.)

So what does the Tick Index number mean? Several times a week, Thomas J. Daniels, PhD, director of the Calder Center and co-director of its Vector Ecology Laboratory, takes drag samples at Calder. He and colleague Rich Falco, PhD, a medical entomologist with the New York State Department of Health, use a one-meter square piece of white corduroy attached to a wooden bar to go hunting ticks.

“We drag the fabric over a known distance—usually 10 or 20 meters—then turn it over and start counting ticks,” Daniels says. “The ticks are host seeking: they don’t care if it’s me or a square of fabric. We know the size of the drag and the distance, so it’s easy to come up with a mean number of ticks per square meter.”

What the scientists are especially looking for are ticks in the nymphal stage, between 25 and 30 percent of which carry the Lyme bacterium. Nymphs are active and abundant from late spring through summer and into the fall. Because of their great numbers, and because they are so small and often escape detection, nymphs cause 90 percent of Lyme Disease infections. Altogether, Daniels and Falco perform drag counts from late March through early December, weather permitting. Adult ticks, active in the late fall, carry the Lyme bacterium at an even higher rate than nymphs, but because there are so many fewer adults, and because they are easier to spot and pick off before they transmit the disease to humans, they cause many fewer cases.

The scale of the tick index measures the relative risk of being bitten in a particular season. “This season isn’t as bad as last one was,” Daniels says, “so you might not have as much risk with an index of eight this year as you would have with an index of five least season. It’s not an absolute measure of risk.”

Daniels said the infection rate of Lyme Disease in the northeast is fairly steady from year to year, but vastly underreported, which is why he doesn’t rely on epidemiological data on Lyme Disease cases to assess risk.

“I would risk my life on my tick data, because I know how to count ticks,” he says. “The epidemiological data are terrible. Lyme disease is often hard to recognize, and as it’s become more common, physicians are less interested in it, and don’t report it reliably to health agencies.”

Daniels estimates that the 25,000 reported cases of Lyme Disease in the United States each year represents only 10 percent of the real number, “and I’m being generous,” he says.

Daniels and Falco have been collecting tick data since 1987. The first incarnation of the Tick Index debuted about 10 years ago, when Falco was working with the American Lyme Disease Foundation. The project languished when funding for the foundation was short. In 2008, the Index was revived and began publishing each season on the Fordham website: www.fordham.edu/tick.

Daniels received his doctorate from the University of Colorado in 1987, for research on the behavioral ecology of feral dogs on the Navajo reservation. He studied how well dogs that were raised initially as pets adapted to living in a semi-wild state on the reservation’s garbage dumps. Not well, it turned out. By 1985 he had already completed that research and was studying ticks and Lyme Disease, which was just coming to prominence as a medical issue in the United States. He has been at the Calder Center since 1994, and has seen the emergence not only of Lyme disease, but also of West Nile virus, a mosquito-borne disease, in the region.

West Nile is a case study of how a disease agent, introduced into the right animal community under the right conditions, can quickly become part of the everyday landscape.

“In 1999, when West Nile first arrived, we had 60 cases in just one state: New York,” Daniels says. “In 2000 it had spread to two neighboring states, New Jersey and Connecticut, and by 2005, the virus was reported in 43 states. Vector-borne diseases are dynamic and they will continue to pose a significant health challenge in the future.”

Daniels, associate research scientist in Fordham’s Department of Biological Sciences, took the reins from John Wehr, Ph.D., professor of biology, on Jan. 1. Wehr, who has overseen the doubling of the center staff and the construction of a 3,800 square-foot, 12-bed, log cabin-style residence for graduate researchers, has served as Calder’s director since 1986. A renowned limnologist, Wehr has also overseen research projects in the center’s 10-acre lake and in lakes and streams across the nation.

Tom Daniels, left, will direct Fordham’s Calder Center, taking the reins from John Wehr, right. Both men are among Calder’s most senior researchers.
Photos by Bruce Gilbert (left) and Bill Denison

The Calder Center is 25 miles north of New York City and consists of 113 forested acres and a 10-acre lake. It is one of the few field stations in North America with relatively undisturbed natural communities near a large urban center. Calder supports scientific and interdisciplinary research in ecology, evolution, and conservation, and provides hands-on education for students of diverse backgrounds and academic levels. The center was established in 1967 on the former estate of Louis Calder, chairman of the Perkins-Goodwin Company.

Daniels earned his doctorate in biology in 1987 at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and joined Fordham as an adjunct professor in 1994. He is currently the co-director of the Vector Ecology Laboratory at Calder, where he and fellow co-director Richard Falco, Ph.D., lead a team of scientists and students in researching disease-carrying insects (vectors) such as ticks and mosquitoes.

In his own research, Daniels has focused on vertebrate-tick relationships and the ecology of Lyme disease in the northeastern United States, as well the ecology of the West Nile virus in the Northeast. He credits co-researcher Wehr with laying a successful foundation for the center.

“I’m flattered to be asked to take over as director when John steps down, and excited to begin the next stage in Calder’s growth. The center has untapped potential that we all see, and I’m committed to help move us along the path to reaching that potential,” Daniels said.
Daniels said his primary role would be “helping to facilitate the research efforts of our faculty and graduate students at Calder.”

“That, in turn, will generate opportunities for our undergraduate students to assist in active research and come away with a unique field experience. It is why Calder exists.”

Jonathan Crystal, Ph.D., associate vice president and associate chief academic officer in the Office of the Provost, said the office is “thrilled” that Daniels is taking the position. He likewise noted that “without the work of John [Wehr], there would have been no Calder Center.”

Wehr will stay on at the center and continue research in aquatic biology.

“The Calder Center is an important asset for Fordham, supporting research and educational opportunities not only for our own faculty and students, but for others across the region and nationwide,” Crystal said.

“We have a lot of confidence that, under Tom’s leadership, Calder will make great strides in fulfilling the field station’s potential.”

Currently, one in six of Fordham’s undergraduates are majoring in biology or pre-health, or both. In 2013, Calder’s Summer Undergraduate Research Program attracted 170 applicants for 10 positions. Calder’s graduate students regularly go on to careers that make use of their biological training, including positions at the Alaska SeaLife Center, the Central Park Zoo, the Malcolm-Pirnie environmental consultancy, the National Wildlife Federation, the New York Botanical Garden, New York Medical College, New York City’s Department of Environmental Protection and Department of Health, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute.

For Nancy Busch, Ph.D., dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and chief research officer/associate vice-president for academic affairs, the transition is a good time to reflect on how Wehr’s work helped make the Calder Center a nationally and internationally recognized field station whose scientists are at the forefront of research and education on issues of ecological significance and global conservation.

“I believe that Tom Daniels will continue to establish Calder’s prominence as a center for the study of key issues in ecology involving urbanization and conservation, such as invasive species, water quality and vector borne illnesses like Lyme disease,” she said.

“Tom has great passion for Calder and understanding of its unique position as a biological field research station at the urban-rural gradient in one of the world’s foremost urban environments.”

But for things that slither, soar, scamper and swim, it’s a different story.

Coyotes roam the 113-acre Louis Calder Center Biological Field Station in Armonk, N.Y. Red-tailed hawks are raising chicks on a building ledge at Rose Hill. Wild turkeys wander the grounds at Westchester. And visitors to Lincoln Center are not immune from encounters with pigeons.

Though Fordham’s four campuses are geographically and ecologically distinct, they all feature animals with unique capacities for adaptation, said Thomas Daniels, Ph.D., associate research scientist at the Calder Center.

“They’re generally going to be omnivorous, and can take advantage of a lot of different food sources,” Daniels said, “while animals that require a certain patch of woods or a certain body of water would be relegated to areas that are less developed.”

One of the strengths of the Calder Center is its size, its 10-acre lake and the fact that it is contiguous to other heavily forested sites, he noted. These features allow animals to travel freely between Calder and surrounding areas.

Rose Hill and Westchester are near other wooded areas, but major roadways that run alongside the campuses create formidable barriers for ground animals. For instance, birds can venture from the New York Botanical Garden or the Bronx Zoo to Rose Hill, but Southern Boulevard is wide enough and busy enough to discourage small mammals such as opossums from crossing.

“It’s almost like a positive feedback loop. If you’ve got animals in one particular place, that opens up a habitat for more animals to arrive to feed on them,” he said.

This is partly why sightings of coyotes (and most recently, a mountain lion in nearby Greenwich, Conn.) are increasing. Red-tailed hawks feast on pigeons and rats in the city, while coyotes and mountain lions rely on robust populations of white-tailed deer for food in the suburbs.

“When I started at the Calder Center in 1985, it was very, very unusual to see a coyote. As a matter of fact, I was stunned when I saw one back in the mid ’80s. Since then, they’ve managed to get more than a foothold,” Daniels said.

At the Lincoln Center campus, sightings of coyotes, turkeys or deer are nonexistent. But even in Manhattan, Daniels said, lessons can be learned from the pigeons, blue jays, sparrows and starlings that live there.

He noted that studies in Sweden and Spain have shown that birds that do well in urban areas have larger brains, relative to their body size, than birds in more bucolic environs.

“We make fun of pigeons as rats of the air, but they’re smart birds,” Daniels said. “They do well in areas where people are not necessarily happy to have something ripping through their garbage. They have a certain social system, and they’re able to figure things out at a level that not all birds can.”

At the Calder Center, Daniels said he’s not expecting to see moose wander down from Maine any time soon. Bears, on the other hand, are a possibility.

“We’re not that far from Tuxedo Park and parts of Jersey, and that Tuxedo Park/Sterling Forest area is where the bears seem to be doing pretty well. I wouldn’t be surprised if we start to hear reports of sightings,” he said.

“If they manage to find a way to make a living without bothering us too much, they have a much better shot at staying here than they would if they interfere with human activity,” he said.

“We’re pretty tolerant of most things, but that tolerance only goes so far.”

For more on the animals at the Calder Center, visithttp://www.fordham.edu/academics/office_of_research/research_centers__in/the_louis_calder_cen/climate_and_ecologic/vertebrates_12514.asp

For more pictures of the red-tialed hawks at Rose Hill, visit Richard Fleisher’s flickr page athttp://www.flickr.com/photos/profman_wildlife_photos/collections/72157618334941687/

On a sunny spring day with a lingering edge of a chill, Thomas Daniels, Ph.D., (above, left) and Richard Falco, Ph.D., (right) step out for a quick jaunt in the tick-rich environs of Fordham’s Louis Calder Center Biological Field Station.

Dragging a 3-foot by 3-foot sheet of white corduroy along the side of the road, they snare a half dozen black legged ticks on the cloth at a rate of more than one per minute.

“They’re resting on top of the blades of grass and waving their front legs, just looking for something to carry them off,” says Daniels, an associate research scientist in the biology department.

Something like a deer, perhaps? The leg of a dog? Or a human ankle? Yes, he says, pretty much anything they can latch onto that will provide a blood meal.

Rich Falco, Ph.D., helps New York state manage insects that are a threat to public health. Photos by Bruce Gilbert

But the ticks that Falco and Daniels catch are headed for an odd form of immortality at Calder’s Routh House, a sprawling, two-story brick structure that hosts Fordham’s Vector Ecology Laboratory (VEL). As co-directors of the VEL, they oversee University-funded research on diseases carried by ticks and mosquitoes.

Some of the ticks will be painted for a mark-release-recapture project. Others will be tested for the presence of Lyme and other diseases. One may end up on a slide as a reference sample. Still others will simply be counted and then stored in ethanol.

Yes, there is state and regional surveillance of New York ticks and mosquitoes, and Falco, Daniels and their staff are the ones who handle it.

Since 2007, the Calder Center has held a contract with the New York State Department of Health to act as its Regional Medical Entomology Laboratory (MEL) for nine counties in the metropolitan region, by far its most populous area.

The contract, which runs through 2011, designates Calder as one of New York’s focal points for vector-borne disease research and related public health issues.

As a state regional medical entomologist, Falco coordinates the sampling of ticks and mosquitoes in the lower Hudson Valley; he is assigned to the counties of Sullivan, Ulster, Duchess, Putnam, Orange, Rockland and Westchester, as well as Nassau and Suffolk in Long Island. He oversees four services:

• conducting routine surveillance on ticks and mosquitoes, as well as the various pathogens that infect them, and reporting that information to the state;

• finding ways to detect and control the risks of diseases carried by ticks and mosquitoes;

• offering instruction to undergraduate and graduate students and physicians; Falco also teaches at New York Medical College;

John Kokas keeps a state insect reference collection.

• providing outreach and assistance to the county health departments on ticks, mosquitoes and other vector-borne diseases, which includes being response-ready in the case of a public outbreak of a disease such as the West Nile virus.

“Perhaps that is our most serious obligation,” Falco said. “If there is a public health emergency of that nature, we would stop whatever we are doing, assist our assigned counties with their trapping efforts and help coordinate the research.”

Such emergencies are rare, he added, but one happened in the summer of 1999, with the sudden outbreak of West Nile virus in all five boroughs and the surrounding region. That year, 62 people became ill and seven people died from a new vector-borne disease spread by mosquitoes that had bitten infected birds. Birds were implicated in the transmission cycle when thousands were found dead in New York. This was the first time West Nile had been reported in North America; today, it is endemic in the United States.

“The area north of New York City is a prime mixing zone between people and vectors,” Falco said. “You’ve got suburban rural habitats where you find ticks and mosquitoes. You’ve got an urban area teeming with people. Everything comes together here.

“The state saw Calder’s location and the VEL’s track record, and realized it was an advantageous spot for a state entomology lab,” he said.

In the Routh House labs, a person can’t wander too far without being confronted by bugs—living, dead, or immortalized in popular culture. The hallway is decorated with movie posters from some of the mutant bug genre classics: Arachnophobia, Tarantula. Sitting atop of two filing cabinets is a “Flea Circus” game, circa 1960.

“Tom picked that up at a flea market,” Falco said jokingly.

Besides employing Falco, the state pays for two research technicians: John Kokas and Vanessa Vinci. Kokas’ area of the lab is inhabited by, among other things, a live tarantula and an aquarium filled with prehistoric-looking Madagascar Hissing Cockroaches.

“I keep them just for fun,” he said.

Tom Daniels, Ph.D.,  studies what makes ticks tick.

Kokas is completely serious, however, when it comes to the business of mosquitoes. In fact, Falco refers to him as “a real bug man.” He is responsible for collecting, identifying and mounting some 40 to 50 different mosquito species found all over the state.

Kokas keeps a New York state insect specimen reference collection in several wooden cabinets housing glass display cases—from the smallest mosquito (Uranotaenia) to the largest (Toxorhynchites) as well as a host of beetles, biting flies, bees, wasps, lice and bed bugs for educational and identification purposes.

When local health departments prepare to do their annual mosquito surveillance each spring, they often send their personnel to the MEL to train with Kokas.

“You need good clean intact specimens in order to train people what to look for,” Kokas said. “So we bring them here to show them the mountings. Once they study them, they can usually go out and I.D. them.”

Through his microscope, Kokas displayed the beautiful side of ugly: up close, an Uranotaenia sapphirina mosquito is ornamented with fine iridescent blue stripes on its body and gossamer wings.

To catch mosquitoes, Kokas uses a wooden box painted black, facing west. When the sun is out, Kokas said, biting mosquitoes go wherever they can to stay in the shade. Trapping for counting purposes is also done with light traps and gravid traps for egg-bearing females.

MEL staffers work closely with the state to monitor medically important insect populations and share that information. Falco reports regularly to Albany on the site totals from his counties. Twice ayear he sends samples of ticks from his counties to be tested for agents of Lyme disease and other tick-borne infections.

Lyme disease is the biggest vector-borne disease in the country, and a quarter of the nation’s cases occur right here in New York state. Approximately 25 percent of the nymphal ticks and 50 percent of the adult ticks that Daniels and Falco encounter are infected with the Lyme disease agent.

“From this surveillance work, we get a handle on what the infection rates are throughout the state and how they are changing over time,” Falco said.

As an additional service to surrounding counties, during the active tick season—May to October—Fordham’s VEL posts a once-weekly Tick Index online. The index, which went active on Memorial Day weekend, estimates the risk of being bitten by a nymphal or adult deer tick based on the density of their population during the week.

Daniels and VEL staffers do research on how disease spreads among ticks, which animals they feed on, and how temperature affects their life cycle; all research conducted by the VEL is also available for use by New York state.

“The beauty of melding the two institutions—Fordham and the regional Medical Entomology Lab—is the way we can join hands,” Falco said. “The state is interested in using our research to reduce risk and maintain public health. While the University, with its academic perspective, is interested in the basic ecology of vector-borne disease systems.”

There is, of course, some slight risk in working with diseased insects, said Falco, who was one of the first scientists to earn a doctorate on the study of the tick known as Ixodes scapularis. Over the years both he and Daniels have contracted Lyme disease, more than just once.

“But that’s the nature of the job,” he said.

The blacklegged tick, Ixodes scapularis, has a complicated two-year life cycle that revolves around feeding on the blood of animals. It’s the whole bloodsucking thing that makes the tick a vector, or carrier, of diseases like Lyme (and babesiosis and anaplasmosis, among others). Ticks are born without the bacterium that causes Lyme Disease, Borrelia burgdorferi. When they feed on animals and birds that are “reservoir competent,” meaning they can carry and transmit the Lyme bacterium, the ticks acquire it. If you provide the tick’s next meal, it can return the favor by infecting you with the disease. (White footed mice, chipmunks and robins are reservoir competent; gray squirrels, deer and opossums are not.)

So what does the Tick Index number mean? Several times a week, Thomas J. Daniels, Ph.D., Fordham associate research scientist and co-director of the Calder Center’s Vector Ecology Laboratory, takes drag samples at Calder. He and colleague Rich Falco, Ph.D., a medical entomologist with the New York State Department of Health, use a one-meter square piece of while corduroy attached to a wooden bar to go hunting ticks.

“We drag the fabric over a known distance—usually ten or twenty meters—then turn it over and start counting ticks,” Daniels says. “The ticks are host seeking: they don’t care if it’s me or a square of fabric. We know the size of the drag and the distance, so it’s easy to come up with a mean number of ticks per square meter.”

What the scientists are especially looking for are ticks in the nymphal stage, between 25 and 30 percent of which carry the Lyme bacterium. Nymphs are active and abundant from late spring through summer and into the fall. Because of their great numbers, and because they are so small and often escape detection, nymphs cause 90 percent of Lyme Disease infections. Altogether, Daniels and Falco perform drag counts from late March through early December, weather permitting. Adult ticks, active in the late fall, carry the Lyme bacterium at an even higher rate than nymphs, but because there are so many fewer adults, and because they are easier to spot and pick off before they transmit the disease to humans, they cause many fewer cases.

The scale of the tick index measures the relative risk of being bitten in a particular season. “This season isn’t as bad as last one was,” Daniels says, “so you might not have as much risk with an index of eight this year as you would have with an index of five least season. It’s not an absolute measure of risk.”

Daniels said the infection rate of Lyme Disease in the northeast is fairly steady from year to year, but vastly underreported, which is why he doesn’t rely on epidemiological data on Lyme Disease cases to assess risk.

“I would risk my life on my tick data, because I know how to count ticks,” he says. “The epidemiological data are terrible. Lyme disease is often hard to recognize, and as it’s become more common, physicians are less interested in it, and don’t report it reliably to health agencies.”

Daniels estimates that the 25,000 reported cases of Lyme Disease in the United States each year represents only 10 percent of the real number, “and I’m being generous,” he says.

Daniels and Falco have been collecting tick data since 1987. The first incarnation of the Tick Index debuted about 10 years ago, when Falco was working with the American Lyme Disease Foundation. The project languished when funding for the foundation was short. In 2008, the Index was revived and began publishing each season on the Fordham website: www.fordham.edu/tick.

Daniels received his doctorate from the University of Colorado in 1987, for research on the behavioral ecology of feral dogs on the Navajo reservation. He studied how well dogs that were raised initially as pets adapted to living in a semi-wild state on the reservation’s garbage dumps. Not well, it turned out. By 1985 he had already completed that research and was studying ticks and Lyme Disease, which was just coming to prominence as a medical issue in the United States. He has been at the Calder Center since 1994, and has seen the emergence not only of Lyme disease, but also of West Nile virus, a mosquito-borne disease, in the region.

West Nile is a case study of how a disease agent, introduced into the right animal community under the right conditions, can quickly become part of the everyday landscape.

“In 1999, when West Nile first arrived, we had 60 cases in just one state: New York,” Daniels says. “In 2000 it had spread to two neighboring states, New Jersey and Connecticut, and by 2005, the virus was reported in 43 states. Vector-borne diseases are dynamic and they will continue to pose a significant health challenge in the future.”

The contract, which will run through 2011, designates the Calder Center as one of the state’s focal points for vector-borne disease research and related public health issues. It will cover Sullivan, Ulster, Duchess, Putnam, Orange, Rockland and Westchester counties and parts of Long Island. Previously, the region’s entomology laboratories had been located at Cornell University in Ithaca and Sullivan County Community College, part of the State University of New York system in Loch Sheldrake, N.Y.

Under the contract, the Calder Center will monitor local populations of ticks and mosquitoes; research ways to detect and control the risks of diseases these insects carry; collaborate with local departments of health in all nine counties with regard to such diseases; and be response-ready to public outbreaks of vector-borne diseases such as the West Nile virus. The contract will pay the salaries for researchers and technicians to work side-by-side with staff at the Calder Center’s well-established Vector Ecology Laboratory (VEL).

Richard Falco, Ph.D., associate research scientist and co-director of the VEL, will act as the state’s metropolitan regional medical entomologist. “Given our experienced personnel, the strong commitment by Fordham in supporting this kind of work and our location in a suburban, populated habitat where mosquitoes and ticks proliferate, it was a natural place for the state to choose,” Falco said.

The contract comes on the heels of the Calder Center’s receipt of a $388,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health to study fungi that can kill the black-legged tick, one of the major transmitters of Lyme disease. That grant was awarded to Falco, VEL co-director and associate research scientist Thomas Daniels, Ph.D. and Amy Tuininga, Ph.D., associate professor of biology.

Nancy Busch, dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS), said the state has recognized the “quality work done by the staff of the VEL for many years.

“The contract demonstrates the positive benefits of Fordham’s commitment to basic scientific research and applications—both prevention and intervention,” she added.