Pennsylvania Game News - June 2010 - 10

the blame for most Lyme disease cases because humans are most active outdoors in the spring and early summer. These nymphs are so small and hard to detect that less than one in three people bitten by them ever discovers the biting tick. If the host happens to be a bird, the tick is happy to climb aboard the taxi, snuggle between the feathers and bury its mouthparts in the bird’s tender skin. If either the bird or the tick is infected with B. burgdorferi, by the time the tick is as full as your brother-in-law after a Thanksgiving meal, both the bird and the tick will have it. Because ticks take days to feed, and birds migrate, the pair may end up miles from where they met. Birds can carry infected ticks to new places, and carry Borrelia burgdorferi to ticks in new locations, which will pass it to new birds, mice and people. The nymphs become adult ticks in the fall, after 30 to 40 days. Adults are the size of sesame seeds and look for their third, and last, blood meal. Larger and stronger, these tenacious freeloaders move up the forest understory and are usually found a foot or so above the ground. They begin questing again, hooking onto larger mammals: deer, bear, squirrels, opossums, groundhogs, dogs, foxes, raccoons, cats and humans, to play “Snag — you’re it.” Like the nymphs, adult ticks also transmit Lyme disease and, while feeding, the tick becomes raisin-size, making it

much easier to spot. The tick’s favorite host is the white-tailed deer, a key reproductive vessel for adult female ticks; providing the blood serum necessary for egg development and vital to maintaining tick populations. Adult ticks may ‘winter’ on a whitetailed deer, or spend the winter buried in leaf litter, with snow accumulations acting like a comforting quilt. During prolonged bouts of cold weather, ticks may become inactive, but only to revive as temperatures increase to as little as 28 degrees, with hungry adults biting hosts on warmer winter days. Peak exposure periods for humans are April through September, with the adult ticks questing and looking for hosts into October and November. A veritable pharmacy of anti-inflammatory, anticoagulant, and immunosuppressant and analgesic compounds is found in a tick’s salivary glands and may explain why only about 50 percent of Lyme disease patients recall the bite. Amazingly painless to the host, these compounds flood from the tick’s mouth into the skin, facilitating blood flow to the tick for up to ten days. Other than actually spotting the blood sucking critter, you may be completely unaware of your encounter, unless you are among about 30 percent of the hosts that develop a rash after the bite of an infected tick. Many rashes in body hair go undetected, and it is those invisible tick bites that really tick you off, due to the unintended delay in seeking treatment. The typical expanding red ring or “bullseye” rash may sometimes resemble a pimple-like spot that expands into a pur-

ParTICKulars
• Ticks have been frozen in ice cubes for six months under laboratory condition, yet revive 24 hours after being thawed. • Ticks are related to spiders and have been around for 300 million years. • An engorged female tick increases its weight by 500 times. • Ticks are seeking red blood cells and globin, a protein molecule for nourishment.

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Pennsylvania Game News - June 2010

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