365 Urban Species. Species #036: Deer Tick
Feb. 5th, 2006 10:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
urbpan
Urban species#036: Deer tick Ixodes
Location: Photographs taken at home, Brookline. Tick acquired in Olmsted Park, Boston.
Ticks aren't usually thought of as urban species. Most people may never encounter a tick while in the city. However, dog owners will find them--or the ticks will find the dog owners. Deer ticks don't feed only on deer. Their babies (or "nymphs") are parasites of white-footed mice (a species that is found in the city) as well as urban birds such as American robins, blue jays; adults feed on raccoons, opossums, and squirrels, and of course, dogs and humans. Deer ticks can carry the bacteria that causes Lyme disease, which is very serious but treatable if caught early. Deer ticks can be distinguished from the other common urban tick, the dog tick, by size: deer ticks are about the size of a sesame seed, dog ticks are twice as large.
Yes, I pulled this tick off of myself today. Ticks are active of winter days when the ground temperature is 45 degrees f, or higher.
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Date: 2006-02-06 03:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-02-06 04:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-02-06 04:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-02-06 04:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-02-06 04:49 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-02-06 01:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-02-07 02:46 am (UTC)Ticks don't. They're rude, as parasites go. Not only do they not share any sort of anti-infection agent, but they take the motto "Sharing is caring" to a diseased level. Plus, they don't let go even after gorging themselves...unless they want to reproduce. Yuck.
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Date: 2006-02-06 07:08 am (UTC)Pine Barrens ticks
Date: 2006-02-06 12:08 pm (UTC)Oh, yes. Twenty-three years ago, I and a friend did a day hike through a section of the Barrens. The next day, we found HUNDREDS of ticks embedded all over us. We got thoroughly drunk and pulled them all out. I saved a jar of some of them for testing--I'd grown up just a few towns north of Lyme, CT and had already had Lyme disease back when it was fairly new to the public and medical consciousness--and fortunately none of them carried Lyme. At that point, Lyme wasn't as widespread outside of CT.
That experience taught me something else, too. We washed all our clothes from the hike, and then wore them again a week or so later. More ticks showed up within 24 hours in our skin. After we literally boiled the clothes, finally no more ticks.
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Date: 2006-02-06 01:03 pm (UTC)That sounds like the hike my wife and father in law and I did in a state park near Jacksonville. On the plus side we found a bobcat skeleton and really cool driftwood--on the minus side we got thoroughly entickulated.
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Date: 2006-02-06 06:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-02-06 08:34 am (UTC)And I could write a small tome on the ecology and behavior of hard ticks (or ticks in general)...but it is one of *your* 365 animals. :)
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Date: 2006-02-06 01:08 pm (UTC)I didn't go too much into ecology and behavior partly because I'm keeping my scope fairly narrow, and partly because I don't know too much--you are well situated to know more.
One of the things that bugs me (ha!) about researching certain things is that the most available information is repetitive and irrelevant to me: 99% of the tick information I found boiled down to "tuck your socks in."
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Date: 2006-02-06 10:01 pm (UTC)1.) Ixodes dammini is now considered to be a junior synonym of Ixodes scapularis. Basically, the taxonomists are claiming that Spielman, Clifford, Piesman, and Corwin incorrectly described a population of scapularis as the new species dammini. The reorganization was first published in 1993, and was further supported in 1996. However, some of the older med/vet and extension guys refuse to accept the reclassification, and keep referring to the tick by the old name.
2.) Amblyomma americanum is actually the scientific name of the Lone Star Tick. For some reason, I /always/ want to try and lump Ixodes and Amblyomma together. Brain fart, my bad, I'm sorry.
3.) That's a male tick. You can tell by the way the scutellum covers almost the entire abdomen. Females have a much smaller scutellum compared to the males to allow them to engorge to a much larger size (more blood = more eggs. (Hard ticks only - soft ticks are very difficult to sex.)
4.)Ixodes scapularis is a 3-host tick, meaning that each successive life stage (larvae, nymph, adult) feeds on a separate host, dropping off after it has engorged. This seems to lead to seasonal prevalence: larvae are most prevalent in the summer and early fall; adults are most active during the late fall to early spring; and nymphs (the most likely stage to transmit the Borrelia spirochetes during the late spring to early summer.
5.) Unlike insects, ticks have no antennae. Instead, they have a Haller's organ in the tarsus of their first pair of legs that seems to give them odor-sensing capability. On warm days, questing ticks will crawl up tall stems of grass, grasp the stem with their remaining six legs, and wave the first pair in the air like antennae. Not only does this waving behavior let them pick up any trace of carbon dioxide from mammalian hosts, but it lets them grasp on if the host even brushes by. (There are also semi-apocryphal reports of ticks crawling up into trees and "jumping" onto passing hosts.)
6.) Ticks are most commonly found along borders. Fencelines, treelines, paths, even where a mowed field abuts an unmowed field. These sorts of borders tend to direct the traffic of potential hosts, increasing the liklihood that the tick will be able to latch on. They do prefer taller grass to mown grass, but when populations are high, they'll take what they can get.
7.) I dropped your box in the mail this afternoon. :)
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Date: 2006-02-07 01:54 pm (UTC)2.) Good to know the experts make the same kinds of errors I do!
3.) For some reason, I didn't even consider that male ticks feed on blood. Thinkin' about mosquitoes, I guess.
6.) This makes them especially "urban" to my mind. Garden spiders and golden orb spiders make webs along paths, too. We think of paths as human inventions, but animals make and use them as well.
7.) Woo hoo! Got your oven workin' didja?
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Date: 2006-02-08 06:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-02-06 12:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-02-06 11:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-02-07 03:14 am (UTC)Have you heard of these?
Date: 2006-02-07 11:05 pm (UTC)http://www.kk.org/cooltools/archives/001127.php
Deer Ticks
Date: 2010-03-26 08:53 pm (UTC)