We have (had?) some ticks in our backyard and I came across these which I thought was a clever attack angle: tick tubes.
Permethrin-soaked cotton balls in a tube, mice find them and build nests out of the freely available cotton, ticks that the mice have gathered while walking around die when they come back to the nest.
It does work a little, but it's even more effective to just get some chickens. I did find permethrin works great on clothing - when I used to go hunting a lot I'd get ticks on me every time, and the thing is they climb off of your boots in the car and go under the seats or wherever so you don't get bitten until three days later when you're driving back from grocery shopping or whatever. After I started using permethrin and sprayed the floor of my car with it I never saw another tick again.
Really the best is to check for ticks and weird bruises with a partner every so often.
Got Lyme disease from a tick years ago and it was very visible -> a spreading red bruise with a white middle (it get bigger and looks like it's not healing)
When spotted some antibiotics did their jobs in two weeks if I remember correctly.
I should check the other diseases' visual clues too.
Not every case of Lyme disease has said bruise, and there's other tick borne diseases that ticks pass to you faster post-bite and are harder to treat than early onset Lyme disease is.
If you are out in the woods and you come upon a roughly circular area of crushed down grass, that is a deer bed. Try and avoid walking through it, deer beds are full of ticks.
I’m pretty wary of ticks, when you go for hikes just do a body check after. Also, I tend to go with long pants (even in summer, I dislike bugs more than the sweat).
Plus a lightweight windbreaker can help to cover upper body. Plus it limits sun exposure which is also harmful.
Lethal dermal exposure is somewhere near 100mg/kg.
I probably wouldn’t wear permethrin treated pants and let a cat sit on my lap, but “anywhere near the clothes” is a pretty big exaggeration of the danger.
Tell me your linen ironing tricks. I have a linen shirt that I dread wearing because of the effort that goes into getting it wrinkle free after every wash.
Yeah I’m a huge fan, lots of linen and thin, fine cotton that’s not been formaldehyde treated (so, not “non-iron”) on me in hot months. I even have an open-weave linen sweater that’s comfortable into the 90s of degrees F. I’ve got a few high-twist wool pieces that are nice in the heat, but they’re more specialized, less everyday wear sorta of things.
Dedicated summer clothes in trad fabrics are a ton less durable than their winter counterparts, though, for the simple reason that they’re much lighter-constructed. Individual pieces can be had plenty cheap if you bargain-hunt and shop used, but you cycle through more of them than, say, heavy-weight denim or a hefty tweed. Still, mine usually last a few years. Cycling them out seasonally means they don’t wear as fast as some synthetic-blend shirt you wear year-round, so you may not get more wears out of them, but they last a good long while in calendar time.
But man, do they breathe better than just about any of the fancy “tech” fabrics. And feel nicer. Durability, though, is an issue, and you have to get the fit closer to correct than many shoppers may be used to, because most of them won’t have much stretch (no cheating by blending in some nylon or whatever, like a “tech” fabric would)
How is it really more complicated in the laundry? Most of my linen can do 60C washing cycle (”hot” I think it is called in USA) which is pretty much ”throw it in there with similar colours and forget about it” territory.
The wrinkles are a bit of the charm I think, might be easier to accept if you make it part of the fashion instead of fighting it.
Just a tip, most modern laundry detergents are formulated to handle washing with cold water to save you from having to use (expensive) hot water in a wash.
I have been washing for years now with tap cold water since learning that and it seems to work fine, even in winter.
I joked on Twitter 10-15 years ago that my dream use case for AR would be to easily identify wash temperature for my clothes as I prepare for laundry.
A friend replied with the news that cold would work for just about everything, and I haven’t used warm or hot water since then (maybe once with some really dirty jeans and towels). Such a great hack.
I mostly wash in 35C (expect underwear), so yes I do that. The high temp was to illustrate that linen is one of the easiest garments to wash because you never have to worry about accidentally throwing it into a batch of very dirty clothes and having it come out changed.
Some people don't like the scratchy feel of linen compared to cotton, although there are now linen-synthetic blends which ameliorate this almost entirely.
I have not come across linens that are scratchy. They can be coarse but not scratchy. Blends can be fine fibers. Coarse wool I do find scratchy, unless it’s cold then the scratchiness goes away. Seems like Belgian linen is good.
If I'm going off trail I cram my jeans into my boots and shake everything out before getting in the car. Ontario ticks are just a part of the experience now :/
Do you eat meat? Do you use a car and create carbon emissions? That's destroying ecosystems all around the world, and yet here we are doing nothing about it. Ticks aren't even the base of the pyramid, as others have stated, they're one of many choices for those creatures. Can you name a single creature who relies solely on disease-carrying ticks for food?
What are you talking about? That's absolutely not the case for ticks. And for mosquitos it's often doubtful at best, and false when it comes to disease carrying species as there are plenty of other species available.
That's easy - lyme disease. If you read the studies you linked, it even shows this very clearly.
The first study is talking about constant occupational exposure. By people not wearing basic PPE, over the course of many many years. It's like taking a shower in permethrin every day for 30 minutes. You can pretty much substitute lots of every day things that get absorbed by skin for "permethrin" here and it would cause some very serious symptoms.
The second study used 34mg/kg of permethrin. That is an insane amount, and one that you could not even likely get without intentional ingestion of concentrated powder form.
If you weight 150lbs, that is 2300mg. So a huge horse sized pill of permethrin, every day, will cause issues.
Shocking.
2300mg a day of most substances will cause issues.
Hell, 2300mg a day of most things will cause serious issues faster than permethrin
2300mg of vitamin b3 would destroy your liver very quickly (weeks/months).
2300mg of vitamin b6 would cause permanent nerve damage very quickly (weeks/months)
etc
The reason we don't classify all pesticides as equally dangerous is because they are not all equally dangerous.
Lumping them all together and painting them with a single brush is as unhelpful here as it is when it is done in any other context.
Permethrin is just a synthetic version of pyrethrin, which is extracted from chrysanthemums.
It is probably one of the least harmful substances you will ever be around.
Lyme disease is easily a much greater threat to people than exposure to permethrin and derivatives while hiking.
The exposure to wood dust and other small particles from disturbing the wood chips is probably a greater threat than the permethrin.
Do you mean people should wear PPE when in tick infested areas?
I generally wear pants, full sleeve shirts, long socks etc whenever I go hiking but have still found ticks on me later on. Or do you mean something else by PPE?
Your first link talks about occupational use. Most folks aren't going to have that sort of exposure. A lot of things are definitely a hazard when you work with them often, but doesn't carry over into the general population whose exposure is very low.
Your second link speaks of animal studies, using 34mg/kg of body weight in very young animals (rats) between 6 and 21 days old. Animal studies are valuable, but it doesn't mean you carry the same risk of rats. I'm not sure most folks are going to get that much exposure while walking along trails - for me, personally, it would take 1870mg of repeated exposure. I understand that it would take less exposure for children, but an average newborn is around 3kg and the newborns aren't walking along trails - and in most circumstances, neither are their parents. Especially the mother, who just recently gave birth.
It isn't that I'm saying that pesticide exposure is always healthy or anything, but the type of study and the doses are important to give perspective.
I mean, yeah. Ticks live in grasses not on the ground. If you walk on bare trail and don’t brush on grass or other plants your chance of a tick is much lower
I have a peculiar medical condition which is that I don't sweat... because I had suffered what I would describe as an overdose of adrenaline in the Falkland's War.
I've spread beneficial nematodes several times before and the following 2-3 years I get notably fewer tick bites. They are a bit of a pain to spread over any significant area.
No ticks at the altitude I reside. But with global warming it's slowly creeping up towards the towns further down. Same with Spanish slugs. Will soon be able to thrive here as well.
It still gets cold in the winter (negative 15-20 degrees F) where I am, and even though we had a relatively mild winter, ticks are about the same.
There's a tendency today to attribute everything to climate change, but it should be backed by actual data. It's a sort of attribution bias that to me just feels lazy.
There could be a lot of reasons why ticks might spread. I have lived here 10 years, and haven't noticed an increase or decrease in ticks year over year. Just my anecdata.
> explanations should be backed by data, it's lazy otherwise
> I personally haven't noticed an increase
The relationship between temperature, wetness/humidity, and tick range is extremely well-understood. Altitude is not a relevant variable compared to and controlling for temperature and humidity.
We know under what conditions different tick specie thrive versus die, and we know that as the years go on, there are far more areas under "tick-thriving" conditions for far longer periods, at least for the disease-carrying tick specie that we tend to care about.
No one mentioned anything about climate change except you, reflexively and defensively, for some odd reason.
Through a combination of two of my hobbies, I learned that pyrethroids are toxic to aquatic animals. Glad to see that they used "locations [that] were situated away from waterbodies".
Pyrethroids are very powerful tools for insect control (and non-toxic to humans) but any place where you have runoff or ground seepage is going to be a problem.
Aren't those places the ones most likely for ticks to thrive -- areas near bodies of water where animals like deer come to drink?
So hot take: this would only be useful in places where there are not a lot of ticks?
(PS: Permethrin-sprayed clothing is very effective.)
Wearing appropriate clothing for walking grassy trails is 95% of the solution. Decent walking boots, trousers in socks and a long sleeved shirt goes a very long way.
And no, it does not have to be too warm if you use an appropriate light and wicking fabric.
One existed, it was pulled from the market in the early 2000s. There's still a dog one, and there is at least one which is in late stage trials in the US today.
I am grateful that everything points to the fact I was able to aquire tick resistance. Bites get itchy the moment ticks start to feed, and nymphs die in a matter of minutes while feeding on me.
The most cited research studied wolves' affect on elk populations in Yellowstone restoring riparian habitats(1).
Wolves' impact on the spread of chronic wasting disease (CWD) in deer has also been studied(2). “CWD prevalence could be halved within a decade and eliminated within the century if a pack of wolves consistently and selectively removed 15% of deer in a closed population” (Waldner, 2016)
I don't know if wolves' impact on tick populations has been explicitly studied, but you can find research on habitat diversity reducing ticks(3); and it follows that the lack of predators contributes to deer population explosion, which in turn provides an unbounded vector for the tick epidemic.
A hungry tick is much more likely to make your life miserable because you’re significantly more likely to encounter one in ecosystems with both species.
Given the utter paucity of wolf attacks on humans (vastly, incomprehensibly lower than the rates of Lyme disease), this is a deeply silly thing to worry about.
It’s really clear, sometimes, who hasn’t seen a place that isn’t paved.
This feels like a generalisable cognitive bug with our species.
"Kill all the wolves, die as a result from invisible bacteria carried by tiny arthropods - or from Type 2 diabetic heart failure, as getting out for a hike and staying safe is now too much hassle".
So I don't necessarily disagree with you but people way more rugged than we are and who didn't even knew what a paved road was decided to get rid of wolves a long time ago.
Moreover, what I observed is that urban professional class populations are usually way more in favor of wolves reintroduction than rural working class population.
> Moreover, what I observed is that urban professional class populations are usually way more in favor of wolves reintroduction than rural working class population.
Perhaps their reasons is an economic one (wolf attacks on livestock) and not an human safety one ?
It is definitely an economic one. I occasionally help on a sheep farm which has not been attacked. But colleagues on farms in neighbouring counties have had sheep killed by local wolves. Even if they publicly claim they they lost a lot of money and work (which is true) they also say also fear for their safety. However, in private they are not worried, they know the wolves will flee as soon as a human appears.
I got bitten by a mosquito in Ottawa a couple years ago that sent me to the hospital.. I stopped near the river while cycling to see a raccoon for few seconds, was more than enough for that lil sucker to do the job.
I got bitten by a tick at a cottage near Ottawa and got a fever then bell's palsy a month later. I didn't even notice I got bit at all at the time. A year later, I went to the hospital for a swollen knee and had surgery done, and ended up being tested positive for lyme disease. The doc says you're too young to have bell's palsy and arthritis. Careful out there!
There are some potentially very nasty diseases spread by ticks and insects. For example, flaviviruses like West Nile, Dengue, and Powassan (which debilitated and ultimately killed the wife of Canadian fantasy author Charles de Lint.)
> Twenty 50-m trail segments across two sites were randomly assigned to intervention groups: untreated woodchip borders, deltamethrin-treated woodchip borders, and ten assigned to untreated controls.
> Treated woodchips reduced I. scapularis adult and nymph density by 99 % (incidence rate ratio (IRR) = 0.01, 95 % CI: 0.001–0.08) relative to controls, while untreated woodchips achieved a 48 % reduction (IRR = 0.52, 95 % CI: 0.34–0.78).
Another worrying proxy for how deeply climate change is bleeding into everyday life: coffee prices, orange juice prices, and now having to engineer huge trail areas with woodchips just so people can avoid being bitten by exploding tick populations.
Ticks are a problem regardless. And they don’t like too much heat. So climate warming may even reduce their population in some parts. Or, more likely, move them up north. Giving relieve to some and headache to others…
Lyme disease vaccine would help a ton though. I’ve had Lyme 3 times by now. Thankfully encephalitis stab is a thing.
They don’t like heat? That seems incorrect. If true, Then why are they a huge problem in TX and other southerly areas, and are only now spreading north?
Different species I belive. Ticks in Texas are differnent from ticks in Ottowa. Most lyme disease in the US is concentrated in the northeast and northern great lakes states and into Canada (though it is spreading over the past few decades).
Texas has the 'Lone star Tick' primarily. But in Michigan for example we've had the Blacklegged tick (which is the main species known to carry Lyme in our state...) for a looong time.
The black-legged tick season in Ottawa is March through June and again September through November. Summer (deerfly season) is just too hot for them and they go to ground.
We do all the best camping in January and February. Why, you might ask, when it's usually colder than -20 C? No ticks. Also no mosquitos, blackflies, or deerflies but mostly no ticks.
They seem to be much less active on hot days compared to cooler days in my experience - though I can't say why. I've definitely observed a difference over the years though.
That said, whether it is hotter or cooler doesn't make much of a difference in terms of how you go about your day - you pretty much have to assume you can encounter them regardless.
It's the length and depth of cold days in the winter that can potentially limit their breeding populations, is my understanding. So the issue is that more northerly areas are getting much more variance in temperature and lacking long deep consistent cold periods.
Up and down cycles in temperature have always been a thing on the North American continent but climate change has made it even more variable. We will still get places where it gets very very cold but not for the consistent chunks of time it takes to set back tick populations significantly.
TLDR I don't think it's the heat or cold per se but the variance.
And yes climate change is absolutely the prime factor in their spread. Into places where they were not ever a threat before.
I’ve seen a tick in Wisconsin every month of the year over the past five years or so. That is I’ve seen a January tick one year, February tick that same year or another year, etc. Whenever there is a bit of a warm spell they appear. Presumably small upward trends in temperature allows such warm spells to happen more frequently.
Ticks have always been around Ottawa, and even in 2011? I recall -40C for well over a week, and obviously cold temps around that week.
Insects lay eggs, and also go dormant under fallen leaves typically. The snow + leaves insulates them, it's how live insects survive the winter.
If you watch robins in the spring, before the ground thaws, you'll see them flipping over leaves. They're eating loads of insects hiding, most still torpid from the cold.
-40C isn't a problem for ticks to live through in this way.
In terms of population, everything follows predator/prey cycles. Nothing is static. It's normal for populations to "explode", eventually predators will grow in numbers too.
I see it with noseeums here, and dragonflies. There are almost no noseeums this year, but loads of dragonflies, which means the dragonfly population will collapse, and soon (couple of years) the noseemums will be relentless. But then the dragonflies will grow in numbers, with plentiful food, and the cycle will repeat.
It's natural.
Global warming may shift habitats, but these ticks are normally here. They're not new.
If there was more diversity in predators and prey, the population cycles would have smaller amplitudes. The large swings are often symptoms of a collapsing ecosystem.
The lowest recorded temperature in Ottawa in the last 40 years was -33.1c in 1996. It hasn't been down to -40 since like 1911.
You might be recalling wind chill temperatures, which would not be relevant here. They're subjective perceived temperatures for hairless apes.
However it does occasionally get to (real) -40C ish in Edmonton area, and they now have populations of blacklegged ticks. But very small populations.
Like I said above, the issue is not the absolute lows or highs, it's durations of cold, which impact their ability to recover and produce large quantities of eggs in the spring. This was literally in an article I was reading about ticks the other day, don't make me hunt for it.
Black legged ticks are not new to Ontario, but they absolutely are to places like central Alberta. And the Lone Star tick is moving north for similar reasons and will be established here in Ontario shortly as well.
Ticks in my part of the world were never such a large problem. It was rare that you'd get one on your leg in the field behind our house, and now, you literally can't walk through the grass each year without having 10+ on your legs in a matter of minutes. Warmer and wetter weather and fewer hard winters. The presence of Lyme disease has also increased in them.
I have direct experience of this, so downvote all you want, climate change deniers.
In my whereabouts ticks were common 70+ years ago too. But nobody seemed to give a damn about them since disease-carrying ticks were not a problem. Talking to my grandma, it was common to have ticks in her youth. But now a massive chunk of them is lyme or encephalitis carrying. And suddenly it did become a problem ~ 20-30 years ago.
Norway is projected to have growth in ticks and new tick species because of climate change (warmer and more humid climate), so that's one example of it moving north (though ticks seem to always have been in Norway?)
There has been a vaccine for dogs and cats for a while now, not sure why it hasn't been released for humans yet. Lyme can be really horrible. Some people we know have a 30-something son who was very active (camping, hiking, rock climbing, etc.) until he was bitten by a tick. Now he's quadriplegic.
Lots of drugs work for dogs and cats because they don't live longer than 25yrs. A human has 3-4x the lifespan during which side effects can be worse than the disease.
Is that true? I don't know of really any medicine that has side effects 25 years down the line. Would we even know? We don't test new meds that long before release.
Isn't it more because meds are cheaper to test on animals and liability is much lower?
When I asked why there is no human equivalent of flea/tick drops my vet said it was because "when you only live to be 20, you don't worry about smoking when you are 10."
Encephalitis is much more rare, but it's much worse than lyme. And there's a stab for it. Meanwhile Lyme is much more common, but much simplier to treat. Which is basically „take antibiotics or 3 to 21 days“ depending on how long it's been since the bite.
"Lymne" refers to an infection by the spirochete Borrelia burgdorferi, a bacteria closely related to syphillis. There are plenty of other tick-borne diseases (including localized staph infections at bite sites that can lead to necrotizing fasciitis)
Just like with syphillis, there is a cheap and simple cure that is more effective than any known vaccine. If it's caught in time. Prevention is even cheaper.
The standard treatment for Lyme also just happens to be the standard treatment for many of the other tick-borne diseases, so you're still better-off taking a course of doxycycline after a tick byte than getting a vaccination against Lyme.
I don't understand why we're not vaccinating deer populations, even if we're not vaccinating humans out of safety concerns, etc.
That and deer populations need to be significantly culled (along with rodents, the other part of the Lyme / deer tick population cycle).
In any case, lack of long consistent extended cold spells in the winter to set back their breeding population is the reason they've moving further north. Which is tied directly to climate change.
Permethrin-soaked cotton balls in a tube, mice find them and build nests out of the freely available cotton, ticks that the mice have gathered while walking around die when they come back to the nest.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permethrin - see other animals, I can never get anchor links to copy on mobile.
Got Lyme disease from a tick years ago and it was very visible -> a spreading red bruise with a white middle (it get bigger and looks like it's not healing) When spotted some antibiotics did their jobs in two weeks if I remember correctly. I should check the other diseases' visual clues too.
The best is to never get bitten at all.
The deer trails are a lot harder to avoid.
I’m pretty wary of ticks, when you go for hikes just do a body check after. Also, I tend to go with long pants (even in summer, I dislike bugs more than the sweat).
Plus a lightweight windbreaker can help to cover upper body. Plus it limits sun exposure which is also harmful.
I probably wouldn’t wear permethrin treated pants and let a cat sit on my lap, but “anywhere near the clothes” is a pretty big exaggeration of the danger.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10822630/
Dedicated summer clothes in trad fabrics are a ton less durable than their winter counterparts, though, for the simple reason that they’re much lighter-constructed. Individual pieces can be had plenty cheap if you bargain-hunt and shop used, but you cycle through more of them than, say, heavy-weight denim or a hefty tweed. Still, mine usually last a few years. Cycling them out seasonally means they don’t wear as fast as some synthetic-blend shirt you wear year-round, so you may not get more wears out of them, but they last a good long while in calendar time.
But man, do they breathe better than just about any of the fancy “tech” fabrics. And feel nicer. Durability, though, is an issue, and you have to get the fit closer to correct than many shoppers may be used to, because most of them won’t have much stretch (no cheating by blending in some nylon or whatever, like a “tech” fabric would)
The wrinkles are a bit of the charm I think, might be easier to accept if you make it part of the fashion instead of fighting it.
I have been washing for years now with tap cold water since learning that and it seems to work fine, even in winter.
A friend replied with the news that cold would work for just about everything, and I haven’t used warm or hot water since then (maybe once with some really dirty jeans and towels). Such a great hack.
I would gladly kill every tick on Earth and whatever relies on eating them so no human has to lose a kid to this again.
https://beyondpesticides.org/dailynewsblog/2009/09/occupatio...
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27756609/
The first study is talking about constant occupational exposure. By people not wearing basic PPE, over the course of many many years. It's like taking a shower in permethrin every day for 30 minutes. You can pretty much substitute lots of every day things that get absorbed by skin for "permethrin" here and it would cause some very serious symptoms.
The second study used 34mg/kg of permethrin. That is an insane amount, and one that you could not even likely get without intentional ingestion of concentrated powder form.
If you weight 150lbs, that is 2300mg. So a huge horse sized pill of permethrin, every day, will cause issues.
Shocking.
2300mg a day of most substances will cause issues.
Hell, 2300mg a day of most things will cause serious issues faster than permethrin
2300mg of vitamin b3 would destroy your liver very quickly (weeks/months).
2300mg of vitamin b6 would cause permanent nerve damage very quickly (weeks/months)
etc
The reason we don't classify all pesticides as equally dangerous is because they are not all equally dangerous.
Lumping them all together and painting them with a single brush is as unhelpful here as it is when it is done in any other context.
Permethrin is just a synthetic version of pyrethrin, which is extracted from chrysanthemums.
It is probably one of the least harmful substances you will ever be around.
Lyme disease is easily a much greater threat to people than exposure to permethrin and derivatives while hiking.
The exposure to wood dust and other small particles from disturbing the wood chips is probably a greater threat than the permethrin.
I generally wear pants, full sleeve shirts, long socks etc whenever I go hiking but have still found ticks on me later on. Or do you mean something else by PPE?
Your second link speaks of animal studies, using 34mg/kg of body weight in very young animals (rats) between 6 and 21 days old. Animal studies are valuable, but it doesn't mean you carry the same risk of rats. I'm not sure most folks are going to get that much exposure while walking along trails - for me, personally, it would take 1870mg of repeated exposure. I understand that it would take less exposure for children, but an average newborn is around 3kg and the newborns aren't walking along trails - and in most circumstances, neither are their parents. Especially the mother, who just recently gave birth.
It isn't that I'm saying that pesticide exposure is always healthy or anything, but the type of study and the doses are important to give perspective.
There's alpha gal (red meat allergy ) and also ascending paralysis. And more.
There's a tendency today to attribute everything to climate change, but it should be backed by actual data. It's a sort of attribution bias that to me just feels lazy.
There could be a lot of reasons why ticks might spread. I have lived here 10 years, and haven't noticed an increase or decrease in ticks year over year. Just my anecdata.
> explanations should be backed by data, it's lazy otherwise
> I personally haven't noticed an increase
The relationship between temperature, wetness/humidity, and tick range is extremely well-understood. Altitude is not a relevant variable compared to and controlling for temperature and humidity.
We know under what conditions different tick specie thrive versus die, and we know that as the years go on, there are far more areas under "tick-thriving" conditions for far longer periods, at least for the disease-carrying tick specie that we tend to care about.
No one mentioned anything about climate change except you, reflexively and defensively, for some odd reason.
> No ticks at the altitude I reside. But with global warming it's slowly creeping up towards the towns further down.
I wasn't making any causal claims such as this ^
So hot take: this would only be useful in places where there are not a lot of ticks?
(PS: Permethrin-sprayed clothing is very effective.)
Proximity to water doesn't seem to factor much either. Where I live, ticks this year are horrendous and everywhere.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NGv6RASFsY4&t=26s
And no, it does not have to be too warm if you use an appropriate light and wicking fabric.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2870557/
The good news is that there’s a promising new one in the pipeline but Lyme is only one of the diseases which ticks spread:
https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-deta...
Great, more insecticides :(
Now even in places we least expect them.
Wolves' impact on the spread of chronic wasting disease (CWD) in deer has also been studied(2). “CWD prevalence could be halved within a decade and eliminated within the century if a pack of wolves consistently and selectively removed 15% of deer in a closed population” (Waldner, 2016)
I don't know if wolves' impact on tick populations has been explicitly studied, but you can find research on habitat diversity reducing ticks(3); and it follows that the lack of predators contributes to deer population explosion, which in turn provides an unbounded vector for the tick epidemic.
1. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S235198942...
2. https://wildlifecoexistence.org/blog/wolves-and-chronic-wast...
3. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12445845/
It’s really clear, sometimes, who hasn’t seen a place that isn’t paved.
"Kill all the wolves, die as a result from invisible bacteria carried by tiny arthropods - or from Type 2 diabetic heart failure, as getting out for a hike and staying safe is now too much hassle".
Moreover, what I observed is that urban professional class populations are usually way more in favor of wolves reintroduction than rural working class population.
Perhaps their reasons is an economic one (wolf attacks on livestock) and not an human safety one ?
> Treated woodchips reduced I. scapularis adult and nymph density by 99 % (incidence rate ratio (IRR) = 0.01, 95 % CI: 0.001–0.08) relative to controls, while untreated woodchips achieved a 48 % reduction (IRR = 0.52, 95 % CI: 0.34–0.78).
Lyme disease vaccine would help a ton though. I’ve had Lyme 3 times by now. Thankfully encephalitis stab is a thing.
https://www.cdc.gov/lyme/data-research/facts-stats/lyme-dise...
Texas has the 'Lone star Tick' primarily. But in Michigan for example we've had the Blacklegged tick (which is the main species known to carry Lyme in our state...) for a looong time.
We do all the best camping in January and February. Why, you might ask, when it's usually colder than -20 C? No ticks. Also no mosquitos, blackflies, or deerflies but mostly no ticks.
That said, whether it is hotter or cooler doesn't make much of a difference in terms of how you go about your day - you pretty much have to assume you can encounter them regardless.
Up and down cycles in temperature have always been a thing on the North American continent but climate change has made it even more variable. We will still get places where it gets very very cold but not for the consistent chunks of time it takes to set back tick populations significantly.
TLDR I don't think it's the heat or cold per se but the variance.
And yes climate change is absolutely the prime factor in their spread. Into places where they were not ever a threat before.
It impacts the population, but even a couple solid weeks of -20C weather doesn't seem to be enough to eradicate them.
Insects lay eggs, and also go dormant under fallen leaves typically. The snow + leaves insulates them, it's how live insects survive the winter.
If you watch robins in the spring, before the ground thaws, you'll see them flipping over leaves. They're eating loads of insects hiding, most still torpid from the cold.
-40C isn't a problem for ticks to live through in this way.
In terms of population, everything follows predator/prey cycles. Nothing is static. It's normal for populations to "explode", eventually predators will grow in numbers too.
I see it with noseeums here, and dragonflies. There are almost no noseeums this year, but loads of dragonflies, which means the dragonfly population will collapse, and soon (couple of years) the noseemums will be relentless. But then the dragonflies will grow in numbers, with plentiful food, and the cycle will repeat.
It's natural.
Global warming may shift habitats, but these ticks are normally here. They're not new.
You might be recalling wind chill temperatures, which would not be relevant here. They're subjective perceived temperatures for hairless apes.
However it does occasionally get to (real) -40C ish in Edmonton area, and they now have populations of blacklegged ticks. But very small populations.
Like I said above, the issue is not the absolute lows or highs, it's durations of cold, which impact their ability to recover and produce large quantities of eggs in the spring. This was literally in an article I was reading about ticks the other day, don't make me hunt for it.
Black legged ticks are not new to Ontario, but they absolutely are to places like central Alberta. And the Lone Star tick is moving north for similar reasons and will be established here in Ontario shortly as well.
Ticks in my part of the world were never such a large problem. It was rare that you'd get one on your leg in the field behind our house, and now, you literally can't walk through the grass each year without having 10+ on your legs in a matter of minutes. Warmer and wetter weather and fewer hard winters. The presence of Lyme disease has also increased in them.
I have direct experience of this, so downvote all you want, climate change deniers.
Isn't it more because meds are cheaper to test on animals and liability is much lower?
But prions were the cause, and those are slow acting.
The new, safer vaccine is only recommended if you're going to Japan or surrounding areas, and planning to going outside the city.
Humans generally aren't vaccinated for Rabies either, unless you are e.g. a veterinarian who might have a higher chance of exposure to it.
Just like with syphillis, there is a cheap and simple cure that is more effective than any known vaccine. If it's caught in time. Prevention is even cheaper.
The standard treatment for Lyme also just happens to be the standard treatment for many of the other tick-borne diseases, so you're still better-off taking a course of doxycycline after a tick byte than getting a vaccination against Lyme.
There are also common coinfections which are grouped under the same name, despite being unique.
I assume a vaccine would try to be multivalent.
That and deer populations need to be significantly culled (along with rodents, the other part of the Lyme / deer tick population cycle).
In any case, lack of long consistent extended cold spells in the winter to set back their breeding population is the reason they've moving further north. Which is tied directly to climate change.
That and deer populations need to be significantly culled (along with rodents, the other part of the Lyme / deer tick population cycle)."
Yep, we should extend the deer hunting seasons so we can vaccinate 'em with lead (I'll leave the rat hunting to others).