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Possibly you noticed one crawling up your leg after a hike via tall grass or felt one in your canine’s again as you ran your hand via its fur. For those who’re unfortunate, possibly you discovered one already burrowing into your pores and skin, engorged together with your blood.
Ticks are parasitic bloodsuckers, able to spreading lethal illness, they usually’re turning into more and more widespread. Right here’s what you want to learn about them.
Ticks are arachnids, shut cousins of mites and extra distant cousins of spiders. There are more than 800 species of ticks found around the world, and 84 which were documented in america. Nevertheless, solely a handful within the US chunk and transmit illnesses to people. The commonest ones are blacklegged ticks (also called deer ticks, however they feed on a number of animals moreover deer), lone star ticks, American canine ticks and brown canine ticks.
After a tick egg hatches, it goes through three life stages: larva, nymph and adult. Both male and female ticks feed on blood by inserting their barbed, straw-like mouthparts into the skin of their host (unlike mosquitoes, which only bite if they’re females preparing to lay eggs). However, only female ticks drink to the point that they become engorged.
“When you see a super big and engorged female, that means she’s going to be laying eggs and starting that life cycle process over again,” said Kait Chapman, an extension educator and urban entomologist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
These arachnids change dramatically in size and appearance based on how old they are and how much blood they’ve drunk. “The nymph blacklegged tick, if you put these unfed ones on a poppy seed bagel, they blend in quite nicely,” said Dr. Thomas Mather, a professor of public health entomology at the University of Rhode Island and director of that school’s Center for Vector-Borne Disease and its TickEncounter Resource Center. Meanwhile, an engorged adult female of the same species can swell to the size of a pea.
Tick bites and diseases
While there are some months when different species and life stages are more active, it’s possible to get bitten by a tick any time of year. If you find a tick attached to you (or your pet), you should remove it carefully.
“The recommendation is that you use a pair of tweezers, get the tick by its head as close to the skin as possible and pull it straight out,” Chapman said. “We don’t want to twist, because we could leave part of that mouthpart embedded in the skin. And we don’t want to grab the body because if you squeeze the body the tick could regurgitate more, which means that you’re increasing your chance of getting tick-borne illness.”
Your impulse might be to squash the freshly removed tick, but it’s better if you drown it with hand sanitizer or rubbing alcohol and keep it to show to an expert or at least take a photo. That way, you can identify what kind of tick it is and how long it’s been feeding; the University of Rhode Island’s TickEncounter website has tools primarily based on coloration, measurement and geographic location.
Blacklegged tick larvae and nymphs, for instance, often feed on white-footed mice, which can carry a bacterium called Borrelia burgdorferi. When a tick that’s ate up one in all these contaminated mice then feeds on a human, it could cross alongside that bacterium, which causes Lyme illness.
Lone star ticks, however, don’t feed on white-footed mice and consequently aren’t carriers of Lyme. (They do carry different disease-causing microbes, although, and their bites can introduce a sugar molecule into the bloodstream that makes people allergic to red meat.)
In a September 2023 study, researchers recognized a protein that seems to play an enormous half in how some ticks — together with the deer tick and the Western blacklegged tick — get contaminated by the dangerous micro organism Anaplasma phagocytophilum earlier than spreading it to human hosts and inflicting anaplasmosis, which is completely different from Lyme illness.
Anaplasmosis could cause extreme complications, fever and chills, vomiting, and fatigue, according to Cedars-Sinai.
Understanding this protein could give scientists a greater sense of learn how to cease the unfold of the illness via ticks, the examine stated. However there may be nonetheless a number of analysis forward earlier than they get there.
The illnesses carried by ticks could be debilitating and even life-threatening, and the chance of an infection will increase the longer a tick has been on you. Whereas there are some remedies out there, it’s greatest to keep away from getting bitten within the first place.
Varied research have prompt elements that would play a job in tick attraction, together with a current paper displaying a connection between tick attraction and static electricity in a laboratory setting. And whereas ticks are interested in cues such because the carbon dioxide exhaled by animals, they have a tendency to lie in wait relatively than actively in search of out their prey.
“Contrary to popular belief, they don’t fall from trees. They simply sit at the edge of a tall blade of grass, for example, that’s maybe hanging over someplace, and they’ll put their front leg out. We call that questing,” Chapman said. “They will wait for that host to brush right by them, and so that’s primarily how people get ticks: They brush by it; it attaches to their leg or their clothes.”
Insect repellents containing DEET, picaridin and oil of lemon eucalyptus have been approved by the Environmental Protection Agency to guard towards ticks. Nevertheless, these chemical substances work in a different way towards ticks than they do towards mosquitoes.
As an example, DEET “burns the ft of ticks, they usually fall off as a result of their ft are burning,” versus interfering with the tick’s skill to seek out its prey the best way DEET impacts mosquitoes, Mather stated. What’s extra, “as quickly because the product is dried, it doesn’t burn as a lot, so it actually doesn’t final very lengthy for ticks.”
As a substitute, Chapman recommends stopping tick bites by masking your pores and skin and tucking the bottoms of your pants into your socks. Ticks are also killed by half an hour within the dryer, so toss your garments in as quickly as you get dwelling, even earlier than you wash them.
What’s extra, “we favor wearing treated clothes with permethrin — it’s far, far simpler” than bug spray, Mather stated. “It blocks nerve conduction in ticks, and it makes them hyper-excited after which they only lose operate fairly rapidly, and it really finally ends up killing them.” Relying on the place you reside, he stated, it may additionally make sense to analyze exterminating ticks dwelling in your yard.
These precautions might sound excessive, however to Mather, they’re the best way of the long run, as a result of “we stay in a ‘extra ticks in additional locations’ world, and extra persons are being uncovered.”
Climate change may play some role within the unfold of ticks, however Mather stated he believes that the inflow of the parasites has extra to do with white-tailed deer turning into extra widespread in areas the place larger densities of individuals stay. Because of this, he stated, “Extra persons are being uncovered to the ticks which are reproducing on white-tailed deer.”
Regardless of the unfold of ticks and the severity of diseases that they’ll trigger, Chapman confused that with correct precautions (for you and your pets — ask your vet for tick preventatives), they shouldn’t maintain you hostage inside your private home.
“Sure, ticks exist. Sure, they could be a public well being concern, however we don’t need you to let ticks hold you indoors,” she stated. “You need to nonetheless have the ability to go outdoors and luxuriate in nature, however you simply need to, as soon as once more, carry out these tick checks. So take a bit of little bit of time. Do this.”
Kate Golembiewski is a contract science author primarily based in Chicago who geeks out about zoology, thermodynamics and dying. She hosts the comedy speak present “A Scientist Walks Right into a Bar.”