3/28/2024 0 Comments Tick identification michigan![]() ![]() Deer, once seen only in the wild, regularly turn up on lawns and in gardens, having lost much of their fear of humans and seeing the carefully tended vegetation as a handy place to snack. As housing developments continue to sprawl across the U.S., we’re increasingly encroaching on the habitats of tick-carrying animals. How and where we choose to build homes and other structures matters too. It’s not just going for a ramble in the woods that exposes us to ticks. That, in turn, means more white-tailed deer, mice, and other host animals to which ticks attach themselves for a blood meal-and transportation. The black-legged tick-also called the deer tick, which carries Lyme disease, “used to be in the Northeast and now it has moved all the way to Eastern Canada,” says Moulaei.Ī warming climate also influences the growth of vegetation, with warmer, wetter seasons meaning more leafy ground cover. But elsewhere, a warming climate is a boon to ticks. The same is true for the plains and the western range. Fonseca points out that the southwest is getting increasingly dry as climate change-related droughts persist, and that tends to kill off tick populations. In some cases, climate change actually reduces the population of ticks. It wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for the fact that it’s warmer.” Staten Island has had the Gulf Coast tick for three or four years already, maybe five. “The Gulf Coast tick is now established in New Jersey. “We’re starting to see southern species of ticks coming north,” says Dina Fonseca, professor and chair of the department of entomology at Rutgers University. Rising temperatures affect not only the presence of ticks native to a given area, but the migration of new ones. Anytime the temperatures are above freezing, the ticks will be out there.” “That can be attributed to a very warm winter season. ![]() ![]() “I can tell from the trend that we observed in January and February of this year, compared to the prior years, that we saw a large number of human-tick encounters,” says Thangamani. Brief, mild winters and long, hot springs and summers are incubators for ticks, especially in the Northeast and the Midwest, which once featured punishingly cold winters, but increasingly do not. So what’s responsible for the tick boom-and what can we do to keep ourselves safe? Climate is everythingĪs with so much else, climate change is playing a big role in extending ticks’ breeding and biting seasons. In 2017”-which he believes was the recent apex for ticks-”we received 2,100.” “In 2023, we’ve received 1,800 ticks so far. “This is the second worst year in recent history,” says Goudarz Moulaei, a clinical professor at Yale University’s School of Public Health who also heads the department of entomology at the agricultural experiment station in Connecticut, where local residents send ticks that have bitten them, for identification and counting. Until recently, Thangamani invited people from across the state to send in ticks they had encountered for identification and counting, but the sheer number of submissions and the lack of operational funds to keep up with them forced him to shut down the program. “From 2020 to this year, I would say it’s a 100% increase in the number of ticks humans have encountered,” says Saravanan Thangamani, professor in the department of microbiology and immunology at SUNY Upstate Medical University who tracks ticks and tick-borne diseases across New York. They had a season (April to September), a range (parts of certain states where the temperature and precipitation conditions were just right to support them), and a predictable roster of species (like the deer tick and dog tick in the Northeast, and the Gulf Coast tick near the Gulf of Mexico). Time was, it wasn’t so hard to avoid ticks. The spring seasons have been really, really bad in the past few years.” “And then three of us got one on that same excursion. “I have a dog and I had been walking her in the woods for 12 years, and I’ve never gotten a tick,” says Silbert. Out of an abundance of caution, they went to the hospital, had them removed, and were given prophylactic prescriptions for doxycycline to prevent Lyme disease. Silbert had one on the inside of her knee, and the husband in the other couple had one on his thigh. The next day, her husband noticed a tick embedded in his forearm. They lingered for just a few moments, and then walked back. She, her husband, and another couple were visiting friends for dinner, and after eating, took a brief stroll down a short path to a small pond on their hosts’ property in the Berkshires in Massachusetts. ![]() Marci Silbert wasn’t walking far on the evening of May 6. ![]()
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