Essay by Eric Worrall
If warmer climates breed more ticks, why aren’t we who live in warmer regions overrun with the nasty things?
Take it from a Canadian, ticks aren’t nice – and climate change means they’re thriving in the UK
Stephen Buranyi
Wed 5 Apr 2023 23.59 AESTEngland and Scotland are experiencing a tick-borne virus outbreak. We don’t know the causes, but we know rising temperatures will mean more of them.
Where I’m from, you can’t be considered a responsible outdoor person unless you’re willing to inspect your father’s naked body for ticks. Nova Scotia, on the east coast of Canada, has the dubious honour of being among the tick-iest places in the world. Surely these things are hard to measure, but reputable scientists claim it has the highest tick-to-person ratio in the country, and, at about one case of Lyme disease for every 1,000 residents per year, the highest incidence of Lyme disease as well. Walking outside on anything besides cut grass or concrete is likely to yield multiple tiny, near-indestructible arachnids that immediately make an upward dash for a warm crevice at the knee, armpit or often, groin, to burrow into. Finding and removing them can require a mirror and some contortions, or a helpful and unsqueamish friend or family member.
Things are – thankfully – not quite so bad in the UK. But the recent outbreakof potentially deadly tick-borne encephalitis virus (TBEV) in England and Scotland is a reminder that ticks are getting worse here, as well. The first suspected incidence of the disease in the UK was in 2019, and cases of Lyme disease also appear to be increasing over the past few years.
Studies have shown several tick species in Europe becoming more numerous, and moving further north. And in the UK, Public Health England’s Tick Surveillance Scheme has found ticks expanding their range across the UK. Rewilding by expanding tree and brush cover, and introducing more deer and other wild animals, can increase the tick population. But a huge driver of the recent exponential expansion of ticks into the northern hemisphere is climate change.
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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/apr/05/canada-ticks-uk-climate-change
Are there more ticks in warm climates? Sure – but if ticks are a problem in Canada, a warm climate is hardly essential to their survival.
So why aren’t the homes and gardens of people like myself who live in the subtropics overrun with ticks? The answer of course is warmer weather also encourages huntsman spiders and lizards and other creatures which capture and eat ticks.
There are still a few ticks around – the little monster pictured at the top of this page bit me somewhere I’d prefer not to mention while I was out gardening. But we have this invention called insect repellent, which if it contains lots of DEET works just as well on ticks as mosquitoes. Spraying yourself with bug repellent seems a lot less embarrassing than the Nova Scotia practice of regularly inspecting naked family members.
I won’t bother reading it all. I think I’m safe to call it claptrap and go have lunch….
Run away!
Not sure where you got that photo but I recall a sci-fi film from around 1960 with a monster spider about that size. I still cringe at the site of spiders. Then there was that old Tarzan movie when he noticed a big spider on his arm and even he was freaked out.
7. Tarantula (1955) – A scientist is experimenting in his desert laboratory with techniques to use radioactive food to make giant animals. What could possibly go wrong?
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A number of years ago I was driving away from a campsite on a lake in southern Oklahoma when I came upon a section of road about 100 feet long with 50 to 100 tarantulas moving across from right to left across the road. They were still coming out the fields and were popping as I drove over them. The ladies in the car were not happy.
Perhaps most disturbing was they were heading directly for the campsite we left moments ago.
The campground must have been quick to take down the “No Vacancy” sign!
I have lived in California and Texas, with enough deer to be a traffic hazard in Texas, and never been bitten by a tick.
I’ve found ticks, both on the ground and on me in Nevada and Arizona.
Western ticks are well known for carrying Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever (RMSF).
“People living in or visiting areas where ticks are prevalent, particularly the southeastern and south central U.S., are at risk for Rocky Mountain spotted fever.”
South central U.S., that is, Texas.
I think I have lucked out. I have also climbed hillsides covered with poison oak, and never had a rash. The guy who was with me had cortisone shots to reduce the swelling enough that he could see.
But associating ticks and warm climates is a bit wrong, as with mosquitos.
Once upon a time, I was a patrol leader in a Boy Scout troop. The leaders tended to put kids with challenges into my patrol.
I couldn’t attend one camping trip because of external duties.
My patrol set up their tents in a poison ivy patch. The two scouts who assumed they were in charge were too busy arguing to notice the abundant poison ivy.
Two of the scouts were treated at a hospital’s emergency room.
One of the mothers called me to yell at me for their son’s idiocy. I told her I wasn’t on the camping trip and her son should have immediately identified the poison ivy. Their lounging and wrestling in the ivy patch was beyond rationale.
One of the first plants taught to Boy Scouts are poison ivy and poison oak.
A MA state official in the state’s fish and wildlife agency got RMSF here in MA.
I’ve lived in Iowa for all but 3 of my nearly complete 53 years on the planet. I had one tick bite when I was about 8 years old, and then when my wife and I went morel mushroom hunt one year, had betwixt us, 21 ticks that we elimanated, with no bites. So between the two of us, ~104 years with one tick bite to speak of. That being said, I do have a good friend who never really got to know his dad as his father died of a tick bite when he was wee lad.
Be cautious when walking through high brush- ticks get up on the brush and wait for your or animal to walk by then leap on you. They don’t bite- they dig into your flesh then suck your blood! You need to be careful removing them.
When I was a kid one method for removing them was to light a match, blow it out and quickly touch the tick with the hot matchhead. It would pull out it’s mouth parts and try to move away. Then you grab it.
(There are probably better ways but you don’t want to leave it’s mouth parts behind!)
We did that with matches, it works well. Also one can cover the abdomen of the tick with vaseline, which causes them to start to suffocate, and they will withdraw from you.
Naked inspection of family members went out with the invention of DDT and Carbaryl. Ticks, and Lyme disease, made a great resurgence after the ban of the former. Elimination of fossil fuels would also eliminate Carbaryl, along with other useful insecticides and repellents.
Wear long sleeve shirts and button the cuffs.
Tuck the shirt into your pants
Wear long pants
Tuck your pant cuffs into your boot tops,
Or wear gators covering your boot tops and pant cuffs,
Or wear velcro straps to close your pant cuffs tight to your leg.
When you finish work in the garden, head to your bathroom and strip.
Check your neck and hair carefully.
Pay attention to any feeling of crawling insects on your skin.
My brothers always feel ticks when they bite. I rarely feel a tick bite. I do catch many ticks when they are crawling on me. I am allergic to the little beggars and find the rest within hours of the bite.
This works extremely well for chiggers too, a tiny relative of ticks.
DEET is extremely dangerous to eyes.
There are reasons why the military impregnates deet into clothing.
Guinea hens are avid insectivores and love ticks and they are quite independent birds.
Ticks and chiggers climb looking for entry to the blood supply. They are not the fastest of critters.
Chiggers are mostly encountered when brush and fields are damp as they are quickly dehydrated on dry days. One can spot them as small reddish dots hanging on the ends of twigs and leaves where they hold their legs out to catch at passing animals.
deet isn’t nearly as good as permethrin- which you can buy at any sporting goods store or Walmart or online
Agreed. On the few occasions I used deet it actually seemed to attract insects to open areas of skin it had been applied to. I also don’t enjoy slathering myself in odorous oily substances.
permethrin is applied only to clothes never to skin- I then use a light spray of deet on exposed skin, face, hands and back of head- the first time I got it, and put it on my work clothes, hung up in on a chair in back yard, a few hours later I found a few dead ants on the clothes
weird but most loggers and foresters in MA have gotten Lyme, some more than once and when I see them outdoors, they seldom use “good practices” like permethrin, putting pants in socks, light colored clothes, etc.
A friend got it back in the ’90s when nobody here heard of Lyme and he wasn’t diagnosed- now it’s chronic- they don’t find the bacteria in his system – apparently it’s now an auto immune problem- another friend got it and despite being treated now has bad knees from it. It’s a bad disease, worse than Covid.
The one that concerns me the most is “Alpha-gal” syndrome. You can get it by being bit by the Lone Star tick. It makes you allergic to mammal meat – so no beef or pork.
For the other topic – isn’t DEET a repellent while permethrin an insecticide?
right- you put the permethrine only on clothes and boots not on skin- the label usually says to also put on socks but since our feet will sweat in hot weather I don’t put on my socks- instead I use deet on them- and I’ll wear “tube socks” that go almost up to my knees- and put my pants into them
Especially for ticks as permethrin kills ticks.
Deet is only an irritant that is supposed to prevent ticks from biting.
Though deet is really good at killing mosquitos.
Song lyrics: Ticks by Brad Paisley
I’d like to see you out in the moonlight
I’d like to kiss you way back in the sticks
I’d like to walk you through a field of wildflowers
And I’d like to check you for ticks
Written by Kelley Lovelace, Tim Owens, Brad Paisley
I’ll see your ticks and raise you a blackfly.
The crap about a warmer climate causing more ticks is the product of the fevered imagination of someone who doesn’t know much. The post-secondary education system has a lot to answer for. ie. it’s hard to be that stupid without a few post-grad degrees.
Blackflies are common in North Ontario where it’s cooler than Southern Ontario. So, if Southern Ontario is warmer, why doesn’t it have even more blackflies?
Here’s an interesting map showing lyme disease (carried by ticks) distribution by state. It’s prevalent in the northeast and much less so everywhere else. Obviously it’s not positively correlated with temperature. ie. a higher temperature doesn’t mean more ticks.
No problem the rising sea level will wipe them all out.
Glass half full.
The glass is too big
We have both cattle ticks which usually cause pets & people little harm, other than an annoying wound, & paralysis ticks here in South East Queensland. The latter being deadly to pets, & dangerous to humans. They are usually a summer problem, summer being our wet season.
This year we had a very wet autumn & winter, & the ticks became a real problem. We were getting some regularly on us, lost one cat, & spent $1400 on vet treatments to save a cat & a dog.
All pets were treated with the best prevention available, & we were still finding a few each week on 4 pets.
Since spring it has become very dry here, & the ticks have disappeared. This leads me to blame wet conditions rather than temperature for their prevalence this last winter.
But isn’t EVERYTHING in Queensland trying to kill you?
You must be thinking of California. Have you ever bought something that didn’t have one of their warning labels on it? 😎
Queensland also has the greatest diversity of ants in the world. Over 14,000 species. Start counting 🙂
Yes, Nature is very active and robust in Qld.
But Nature is always trying to find ways to off all current versions of species everywhere, so that they can be replaced by those species that out-compete the current species.
That’s why Nature also introduced the Darwin Awards.
In western Colorado we have a similar occurence, where there has to be a wet period after the spring thaw and prior to going dry for the summer. If this does not occur, no ticks.
“paralysis ticks”
I have heard of just one instance of this. The daughter of a small-town doctor developed paralysis and was taken to a large hospital in another state. One of the clients of the doctor stopped by to see him and upon hearing of her plight, asked if she had been checked for ticks. A long-distance call {remember those} confirmed that she had not been checked.
There was a tick under the hair on her neck. She was soon on her way to recovery.
I grew up in rural Perthshire, 700 ft/210 metres up a hill in the 1950-70s. Ticks were always a problem and our location being known for them. We weren’t farmers, but my dad liked living away from people
Back then sheep were dipped in substances now banned to coincide with the spring tick rise.
Cats and sheep dogs had to be regularly checked for ticks, cats used to get them round the head. One problem was Red Water Fever in cattle, and which I just looked up and in the UK is caused by Babesia diverges. Red Deer can also be infected so it’s a continuing issue
I had tick bites on several occasions, more than one in a year sometimes. But I was at high risk as summer jobs were things like Grouse Beating, deer stalking and sheep husbandry. A job not recommend for a lot of reasons is packing wool sacks which by the end of the day usually involved tick removal.
In the last 50 years the number of people who expose themselves to ticks in that area has increased many fold. I suspect many aren’t aware that there’s a tick problem or that there are tick borne diseases.
Long sleeve shirt with tight cuffs and trousers bloused in the boots will close off the primary entry points. Of course a good hat is necessary in tick country. And a head net is an excellent addition where they’re really thick.
Ticks “quest”. They go out to the end of a branch or leaf waiting for a potential host to come by to latch onto. They can home in on the CO2 a potential host exhales. Highest concentrations are usually found along game trails.
They prefer less exposed vascular areas that don’t get much friction from motion to imbed. The scrotum is often a preferred location for them on the body. Highly vascular, warm, soft skin more easily penetrated. But they can generally be found with their heads imbedded about anywhere on the body except rarely on ears, nose, fingers, and toes.
How on Earth: did we ever evolve and survive before the advent of hideous chemicals, armour plating clothing and modern medicine?
Just how, How Did We Get Here and why are all those things now mandatory if you so much as stick your head out of doors?
What about looking after ourselves properly, what exactly is wrong with that?
Taking some personal responsibility.
How to get eaten by bugs, ticks and mosquitoes:
1/ Eat sugar and carbohydrate: Inside of us it is metabolised, whether we want it or not, into things that light us up like a Huge Neon Sign saying:
Hey bugs and critters, look at me. I’m big fat and tasty, come and get me
Because sugar is turned into Carboxylic acids e.g. Acetic acid = vinegar
Notably clinging and pungent aromatics that bugs & critters are purposely designed to home in on. They know that because warm-blooded critters pumping blood release those in quantity – after they’ve eaten sugar.
Their primary target was of course, grass-eating ruminants. Not us.
2/ Consume alcohol: We all know ‘that smell’ = the sweet sickly and clinging aromatic that comes off people who’ve been drinking (what the traffic cop is sniffing for when you’re asked to ‘wind the window down’)
That is Acetaldehyde = an absolutely insane attractant for bugs & biting things
3/ Allow yourself to fill up with fungi; OK, it is entirely unavoidable that we have some amount of fungi living about our person, both inside and out. They probably do something useful.
But if you let them get out of control by living in a damp and wet dump (anywhere on Earth apart from where we naturally evolved) – those fungi and yeasts will turn almost anything (sugar especially) into Alcohol and Carboxylics and the bugs will home in on them like heat-seeking missiles.
The single-cell fungi inside our stomachs whether we want them or not, will make any sugar we eat into alcohol and thereafter yet more stink smelly carboxylic.
Especially as our bodies recognise those chemicals as toxins and so try to get rid of them.
And in every way we do excrete the poisons (pee them out, poo them out, breath them out and sweat them out) we leave a big bright neon-illuminated and glow-in-the-dark trail that the bugs can and do follow. While shining a super-trooper spotlight on ourselves
(How Mosquitoes find us so effectively at night despite being such poor flyers and nearly blind – they home in on those chemicals)
4/ Deprive yourself of Vitamin B: We all know the smell of the B Vitamins, especially Thiamine (the one that makes your wee turn yellow?)
Bugs and critters hate the scent of that stuff.
Fill yourself with sufficient Vitamin B and they’ll keep away from you
If you really really truly want to get ill.
Persist in tramping around places you shouldn’tTrash Your Own Immune SystemLots of ways to do #2, all the above mentioned things do that anyway but 4 real killers:
Deprive yourself of Vitamins A, B, C, D and EBecome deficient in Zinc and SeleniumContinue drinking & smoking, they strip away nearly all your natural protections.Allow yourself to become stressed. Stress does to us what drinking/smoking doesThere are myriad other anti-oxidants to protect against getting ill, Quercetin especially also Turmeric and Ginger
After all that and to deter the monsters instead of attracting them
(are you really sure that DEET is OK?)..
Go natural, as all our forebears did and it must have worked because: Here We Are.
Lemon eucalyptus oil.Lavender.Cinnamon oil.Thyme oil.Greek catmint oil.Soybean oil.Citronella.Tea tree oil.PeppermintAin’t that a true wonder, Soybeans do something useful – apart from making the paint that was used on The Ford Model T
Unless you regard ‘Turning boys into girls’ as useful. silly me
And when all those things fail,
Lie about what you’ve been doing and blame somebody else
Ah, Climate Change. The gift that keeps on giving Compensation
I have lived in Mississippi and Louisiana most of my life. When I was a child, we had about 30 cows on about 140 acres. There were a lot of ticks in the fields. I was bitten by my share of what we called seed ticks (very small) and would cover my ankles, there were small enough to crawl through my socks. Anyway most of the ticks were “hard ticks.” DDT had little effect on them and it did not stop the dreaded S. American fire ants either. There are tick seasons. I leaned not to go into the fields during those seasons without some tick spray on my lower legs and shoes.
Now we have the small black flies that like small puddles to reproduce and are early morning and late afternoon pest in the spring. They leave large welts on me and they really like my neck and face. DEET attracts them.
“If warmer climates breed more ticks, why aren’t we who live in warmer regions overrun with the nasty things?”
I’ve been a forester in Woke-achusetts for 50 years. Until about 2010- I never saw a tick in the western part of the state- though dog ticks were common along the coast. Then it seems deer ticks that carry Lyme became very common very quickly. It might be due to a slight warming but I doubt it. I think it’s because people are on the move more than ever and ticks go along with them. So, in 2012 I got Lyme. I ended up in a hospital for 3 days. I had been sick for a few weeks with a fever but thought it was a flue- until I passed out. At the hospital they gave me doxycycline which knocked it out within a few days. For 3-4 years after that, ticks were abundant everywhere in fields and forests. To cope with them I developed a routine of using permethrin sprayed on my work clothes and boots. It’s deadly to ticks. Also, I’ll put my pant bottom into tall white socks. I’d stop periodically while working in a forest and find ticks on my boots and the socks. But because of the permethrin the ticks would either die or go immobile- then I’d flick them off. At end of day I’d change my clothes before leaving the site. And as soon as getting home I’d take a shower. I don’t want that disease again. In recent years there seems to be far less ticks than a decade ago. I think when they first became abundant here- no birds or rodents saw them as food but now those animals must be enjoying tick meals. I’ve heard that chickens love ticks.
Guinea hens love ticks!
Chickens do eat ticks when they see them. guinea hens search ticks out.
Ticks are just another part of Spring Time in the Rockies. The power of modern
chemistry is magical, I have trouble imagining how people survived before
organic chemistry treatments.
Frontline for the dogs, ivermectin in the barn yard, my vet had us to use pour on
off label for the sheep/goats. and cows. Works very well. Deet for me.
Around 10yrs ago we had a new to me “ghost moose” outbreak.
Between the moose ticks and timber wolves the local moose population crashed to
nearly zero. I was told it’s common in New England, we had a cow that hung around the place that looked like a pinto horse. I think the wolves got her.
But ticks are nothing compared to West Nile, the invasive bird ECD is the cause of that not
climate change. We have a good vaccine for the horses but nothing for humans yet,
if your under 50 you don’t even know you have it but over 50, it’s horrible.
I’ve had it, it’s bad stuff.
My go-to for that is Vapona.. A hot fogger around that farmstead and a
spray on the nite bedding areas and as a wipe for the livestock.
It’s the active ingredient in the No Pest Strip. I hear
traveling business men even travel with one for their motel rooms for bed bugs. My
dad first started using it back in the ’60s for his annual fishing trip up in Canada. One
quick hot fog around the camp site and no bugs for the entire trip. It’s still available
but restricted and expensive. It’s the fist of God for biting flies and such.
ECD?
“Eurasian Collared-Doves”?
Correct, the West Nile seemed to coincide with the appearance of
the collared doves.
.https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24581347/
The first time I became aware of both the West Nile and the ECD
there were many hundreds of birds around the farm. There was nearby
a barley field that was hit by hail when ripe which shelled out a good
amount of grain on the ground. The number of ECD birds was something I had
never seen before, a neighbor told me what they were. There was an outbreak
of West Nile in humans and some horses that were vaccinated were lost..
Story Tip:
Study says climate change giving extra juice to home runs
Experts say, climate change is “ticking” up home run rates.
This, and almost all articles on the subject of tick borne diseases, fails to mention that ticks do not cause any of the diseases they can transmit. Ticks are not the reservoirs of any disease…they are the vectors — the species that transmit the disease from its reservoir (deer and mice for Lyme) to humans, who are incidental and accidentally affected.
The zoonotic disease cycle requires that the disease exist endemically in the reservoir species — thus it is not the ticks that increase the spread of disease, but the spread of the disease in the reservoir species.
So, yes, if there were no ticks, tick-vector diseases would not spread, but abundant ticks do not mean abundant disease — the sick deer (or mice or whatever reservoir disease) must exist first.
For Lyme Disease, sick deer are infecting healthy deer, spreading the disease from Connecticut across the continent. Then, ever present ticks can pick it up, and pass it to ever-more-available humans in the woods.
A local biologist wrote a piece about the ghost moose that were dying off
and that was thought to be due to this new tick. It only hits the moose
not deer, elk bear ect. I’ve seen moose forever but never seen anything
like that. It seems to be in isolated groups not totally widespread. I
took some photos when I first saw it and when I told some locals about
it they didn’t believe me but when I saw them later they had seen some
infected animals.
When I was young in the 60’s and 70’s, even though we lived in a small town in a rural area of southern Ontario, we rarely ever saw a deer. No deer, no deer ticks, the vector of Lyme disease. These days deer are flourishing. I live in a medium sized city surrounded by good farm land. Living 10 minutes walk from the city core we regularly have deer in our back yard or even sauntering up the street. In our yearly local rural deer hunt, we usually fill our tags. So the obvious answer to why more deer ticks is simply more deer. Attribution to climate change is a knee jerk reaction from those committed to climate activism.
Opossums are supposed to be able to eat up to 5000 ticks a season. People need to stop running over them for entertainment.
My last job was Chief Engineer in the FAA Office of Commercial Space Transportation. My office was on the third floor of the FAA HQ building at 800 Independence Ave SW, Washington DC.
One day in 2018, I was working on something at my desk, and suddenly felt a very sharp pain on my right wrist. I looked at the spot, and saw something too small to identify. Putting on a couple of pairs of reading glasses, I finally realized that I had a little seed tick biting into my wrist. I pulled it off, but the head was clearly still embedded. It hurt like hell, something I’ve never experienced with a tick bite (of which I’ve had many in my life).
My wife had had exactly the same experience on our property, and the same phenomenon happened with me as with her – a target-like ring developed around the bite. She was put on antibiotics to avoid Lyme disease. I just kept applying triple antibiotic salve to my wound, and the ring eventually faded away. It took a year for the wound to fully heal, though.
I subsequently learned that our office had mice running around in it. That is unquestionably where my tick came from, since it wasn’t possible for me to have transported it from our property. Former colleagues of mine at FAA have commented that the building now has a major mouse infestation. The COVID work-from-home regime still survives at FAA, and the people I know are reluctant to go in because of the rodents.
Next time you think that government can assure your safety in an airplane, or guarantee that a rocket won’t fall on you during a commercial space launch, just remember that all 48,000 FAA employees aren’t enough to keep Lyme disease carrying mice out of their headquarters building.
Here is a screen shot of the CDC Handy Dandy Tick Map showing the Northeast US for 2017-2023. I usually get bit at least once a year, even using DEET and rubber bands around arms and legs. Lotta ticks in Vermont…
Source
I live in Far North Queensland, we are constantly pulling paralysis ticks off our cats and dog, and, at least a couple of times a year, off ourselves (fortunately, mostly little ones that don’t pack as much punch). We’ve lost one dog, and nearly lost another to ticks.
Doubt it has anything to do with CO2 though, everything around here wants to kill you, trees put people in hospital from their venom around here.