Streak and a “fun” new expedition

Notes from Nature has seen a lot of activity since before WeDigBio Lite. In fact, we have had 11 straight days with over 5,000 transcriptions. That is an incredible amount of activity! Thanks to all the have contributed.

We have a “fun” new activity, assuming you like cooties that is. It’s called Countin’ Cooties and you can find it in the Terrestrial Parasite Trackers Project.

“Cooties” is a slang term for lice. This series of expeditions is focused on counting the cooties from wildlife. These parasitic insects infest mammals and birds around the world. Cooties are contagious, they spread by contact between hosts. We are all very aware of how contact between hosts leads to the transmission of parasites and pathogens right now. There are over 6,000 known species of lice, and 100s of unknown species and we are trying to figure out how many specimens of each species (known and unknown) are in our collection. Thank all of you that have been working on this project, for your persistent effort to spread the data collecting effort – this is definitely the best way to spread “cooties”!

— The Notes from Nature Team