The Way To Bee with Frederick Dunn - Ticks don't have Heads? Facts about ticks, Interview with Dr. Erika Machtinger, how fast can they really move?

Episode Date: June 5, 2026

This is the audio track from today's Interview on YouTube:  https://youtu.be/SCLLVYeUS3s

So hello and welcome to another episode of interviews with experts. I'm Frederick Dunn, and today my very special guest is Dr. Erica Mactinger. Dr. Mactinger is an associate professor of entomology at Penn State University, where she leads the veterinary entomology laboratory, a certified wildlife biologist and leading national expert on vectors and zoonotic disease. Her research sits at the critical intersection of wildlife ecology, veterinary science, and public health. Dr. Mactinger's work focuses primarily on the ecology, behavior, and management of ticks and other pests of medical and veterinary concern. She serves as a

leader of the vector-borne disease team for Penn State University, translating complex academic research into practical science-based public safety education. She earned her Ph.D. in entomology from the University of Florida and previously worked as a research scientist in the USDA Agricultural Research Service, focusing on area-wide methods to combat Lyme disease. Here's Dr. Macdinger. So my name is Dr. Erica Macdinger. I'm an associate professor of entomology at Penn State. I am the director of the Vector Ed Network, which is the CDC-funded Vectorborne Disease Training and evaluation center and the team lead for our Penn State Extension vector-borne disease team. So I'm a veterinary entomologist. I study pests and parasites on non-human vertebrates primarily,

but that crosses over to people when we talk about things like ticks. And so we do a lot of work here with ticks as well. Okay, so I want to welcome you to the way to be, and I'm so glad that you're here. And for those that are joining us, this is also a podcast on IHeart Radio and all the other podcasts you can name, just Google the way to be podcast and you'll find this. So thanks so much for being here. And also there will be links for the viewers to follow up on our conversation today. One of the reasons I really wanted you to talk with us today is because beekeepers, obviously, are out in the wilds and they have remote apiaries or what we call outyards. And often they're overgrown. And a lot of people are dealing with ticks. And there's some very, very

interesting things that I want them to know and you're absolutely the expert that I reached out to. You're my first pick and I'm so glad that you agreed to talk with me. Number one. Yay. So let's talk a little bit about you're being at Penn State now, but the fact that you're dealing with ticks, how did you arrive at this being your focal point and your research and your field studies? That's a great question. So my original plan was to actually go to vet school. And I got elbow deep in a cow and when that's not for me. So I grew up in the kind of wilds of Maine and wildlife, you know, I was very into animals. So wildlife was the second plan. Went to University of Delaware, their wildlife program and entomology program are together,

one of the only departments were there together and just got really absorbed into the world of bugs. And so I was really lucky after grad school, I was able to combine ticks as, you know, I can work with the wildlife. I can work with the arthropods. I still work with horses and some other livestock in this world. So it kind of, it's this wonderful, interdisciplinary focus that I can have. I don't only work with ticks, but it's allowed me to kind of do a whole bunch of different things and work with lots of different people on a problem that affects everybody, really, if you go outside. So often today, and we're talking about June 5th of 20206, for those that are watching this later, this year there seem to be a lot of headlines about this being a big

tick here, more ticks than they've ever seen before. They're everywhere. They're on everything. There's nothing you can do about them unless you get a possum. And if you have an opossum, they'll clean out every tick in your yard, which I highly suspect is not even close to being the case. But is it a fact that we have more ticks this year than previous years? Yeah, so one of the major headlines is about emergency room visits in particular. So emergency room visits have gone up in every state and most since, I think since 2017 or something like that. And so emergency visit, emergency room visits don't immediately correlate to numbers of ticks. So what we're seeing out in the field here, just, I mean, central Pennsylvania is actually the reverse.

So we're not getting nearly as many ticks as we expected based on those headlines. So we're getting fewer ticks. But ticks don't, they don't move around a whole lot. They require their wildlife hosts to move. So it's very localized. So in some areas, you may have low numbers and I may go, you know, five miles down the road into a forest plot and have very, very high number. So it's very localized where those are highs and lows. But I suspect that the numbers of emergency room visits,

especially for talking about the Northeast, are likely due to an increase in knowledge that the public has to look for ticks. Or potentially increasing activity, you know, it was really cold winter, really snowy, and then it got really nice. And people started spending more time outside. So it probably has more to do with human behavior and knowledge than it does. tick numbers broadly across the board.

I think we can in general say tick numbers are going up consistently, but I wouldn't say that this is, you know, a broad spectrum boom year and ticks are everywhere. I mean, they are everywhere, but just not like pouring out everywhere. And so a lot of people may not know that there are a lot of different varieties or species of ticks. Yeah. So when we talk about the uptick in tick populations,

what the, Is there one species that's more prevalent than others? In other words, what are we finding on people most? And in comparison, let's say a black bear, for example, what kind of tick would they have in the state of Pennsylvania? Yeah, so in Pennsylvania, again, it depends on where you are. So the Department of Environmental Protection actually does surveillance in all 67 counties in Pennsylvania, and they have a dashboard where you can see where,

the tick populations are, which is fantastic. And what they have found is that if you're kind of in this middle, north part of Pennsylvania, it's going to be dominated by your black-legged tick or your deer tick, which is the vector that transmits the pathogen causing Lyme disease. If you're more the southern boundary or really eastern Pennsylvania, Philly area, you have a mix of species. So there could be localized pockets of the Lone Star tick, which is the tick we associated. with alpha-gal syndrome, along with some other nasty things that it carries.

But so it's a variety. There's other ticks out there. There's the Asian Longhorn tick. We have American dog ticks. So a bunch of different ticks that you could encounter. But again, it's interesting that they sometimes they're all together. Sometimes they're in spotty pocket. So it is worth kind of knowing by eyeball what tick you may have found because it does

impact your pathogen risk or disease risk. From a black bears perspective, there's not a whole lot of black bears in Philly, so I can't speak to what they may have picked up there. But in the central kind of northern part of the state, we did look at ticks on black bears over the course of a year and found primarily blacklegic ticks. And the interesting part was that we found all three life stages on black bears. So people always kind of say, oh, the immatures are on mice and the adults are on deer. Well, all three of them are on all three life stages are on Black Bear.

So they're moving ticks around quite a bit up in this area. Do they, at what point in time of the year are they most getting onto the body of a Black Bear? Because since they hibernate or stationary for long periods of time, does that make them susceptible to ticks just climbing onto them there? Or is it because they're always going through the brambles and underbrush? Yeah, primarily, primarily. the latter. So, so black-legged ticks in particular, so again, that's the deer ticks people talk about. Don't move a whole lot, which makes them a real problem when you're trying to study them in the laboratory because they're just like, well, hang out here, we're fine. So they wait. They sit and wait

for their hosts to walk by. So they're getting picked up when the bears come out of, out of their winter sleep. They'll come and walk through brush or brambles where the ticks are and pick them up and they move a lot during the year, hundreds of miles sometimes. So they'll just keep picking them up as they go. Okay. And so you mentioned that Lone Star Tick, and that's the one that's got the like a white dot on its back, pretty distinctive. Is that the one where you have the potential to become concerned about eating red meat afterwards? What does it do to you that causes that allergy. Yeah, so primarily it's the lone star tick, although in Europe it's actually a different

tick that causes this. And even in the United States, they have associated with alpha-gal syndrome. So that's that allergy response with a couple other species as well. So it's possible to get this from other species, but we usually are targeting the lone star tick as our poster child for this. So it's called alpha-gal syndrome. And what happens is that once the tick bites you, your body, and humans are one of the few species that don't have this, this, I'm trying to find a great word for it, but a piece, I guess, of their immune system that the ticks induce. And so they recognize these salivary components that the ticks are throwing into your body is foreign.

And your immune system responds to it. And so it creates, it's almost like, speaking of bees, it's almost like if you get stung by a bee and your body goes into a quick and aggressive response. The challenge with alpha-gal is that it can be everything from kind of feeling icky to death, which is what we saw. I believe it was in New Jersey. There was somebody who actually passed away from this. So there's a range of responses that folks can have. And sometimes it can be after a single bite. Sometimes you have to be bitten several times. And it's kind of hard to track how many times you've been bitten. So it's challenging. And it's not just red meat too. So it originally

came out as a red meat allergy, but it's actually an allergy to all mammalian products. So folks are fine. If you eat ostrich burgers, you'll be fine. But anything that contains mammalian products, so folks are worried about, you know, heart valve transplants, even things like pill caps can have gelatin or products in it that, or dental products that have mammalian products. So you have to be cautious about what you're putting into your body. And it can be kind of scary for folks. So we're not going to suggest that that was a conspiracy theory that the poultry producers are the ones that kicked that off. No, no, no conspiracy theories of the poultry producers.

As you did say, you could eat ostrich meat. You could. Yeah, I'm thinking, I'm thinking now, like that's my second job. I should go start an ostrich farm. And emu are much easier to manage than ostrich. That's true. Yeah. Yeah.

So are there. Yeah. Are there times of the day? Is there a time of day when you have a higher engagement with a tick potential? Are there temperature parameters? Like if it's in the, if it's 38 degrees and you're out hunting, do you have a lower risk of getting ticks than if it's a 75 degree summer day? So that's a really, there's a lot to unpack with that question because it's kind of tricky. And the reason it's tricky is because what you experience and what a tick experience is is a little different.

So ticks are cold-blooded. They respond to temperature, but their world is a lot smaller than ours. So even if it's freezing outside, but the sun is kind of shining on this one space and it's making that little microclimate warm enough for the tick, they can be active in the winter. And we always tell folks, especially hunters, you know, you may be out, you may be cold, but those ticks still could be active if it's above freezing. So there's never really a totally tick-free time of the year outside where you shouldn't be thinking about them. In terms of the more active months for folks are out a lot and doing work, so it really is variable again. So it could be really hot and dry ticks really don't do well in dry weather. But what they do is they go up

and try and find their hosts, a behavior called questing. And when they start to dry out, they go back into the leaf litter to rehydrate. And once they've done that, they'll come back up. So there's this flux of ticks that will come up and try and find a host. So it's really, you know, really challenging to narrow down like a window of safe tick times. And easier just to say, protect yourself if you go outside. You know what? I like the term questing ticks. So they leave their safe spot and they go out and they hope.

Now here's the thing. This is one of the myths we can hopefully rationalize here. Let's say a questing tick would it get up on a branch and drop on a person walking underneath of it. Some people insist that that's happened to them. I have a thought that they just probably discovered the take after they walked through an area, but they think they're dropping on them. Can we talk about how a tick senses its environment and if it would even be aware without direct contact that a mammal were walking by?

Yeah, so I think there's a lot of work still to be done in this field with tick sensory ecology. So they don't have antennae like insects. So they don't have that sensory body like an insect. But what they do have is an organ. It's called the Holler's organ. And it's on the front legs of the tick. And so when that tick gets up on a bush or blade of grass and it's looking for its host, it sticks its hands up in the air and waves them around.

And from what we understand right now, and this is likely different by tick species, but at least I'm going to use black-legged ticks as our model here. What we understand right now is that they're sensing CO2, which is a byproduct of metabolism, so it's telling the tick the thing's alive, and they're sensing heat, which is another byproduct of being alive. So that is their criteria for if they're going to get you. Are you alive? And they'll respond to other things like vibration,

and there's some limited evidence that there are certain chemical cues they may respond to as well. So there's some evidence about tarsal gland extract from deer, for example. so they may hone in on that. So they can sense their environment. Whether or not they're selective is unlikely. If you think about it from a tick's perspective, let's just say we would hypothesize they're selecting for a mouse. By the time the tick would register the smell of a mouse,

given how fast ticks move, if you ever watched a tick, it is not fast. that mouse is long gone by the time they have decided that that's a good host. So their strategy is likely more fall on anything that comes and hopes for the best. I hope it's the right animal or something that I can bite. So you're saying they actually could drop off a branch just because they sense that they're in close proximity to a human or another animal? Yes and no. So the interesting thing about ticks is they have, behaviorally, it changes by region, even within the same species, how high up in the vegetation they quest.

So down in the south, there's a lot more lizards than there are mice. So they quest really low, which means humans don't encounter them as much. But up here in the northeast, they quest a little higher for the mice, and they quest about hip height for deer. So they don't really go much higher than that, because if they were to go higher than that, they would dry out and likely die. So finding them in trees is really unlikely. It's just, I mean, if you think about getting up a tree from a ticks perspective, they don't fly. So that's a long walk for them. However, so I used to just say, you know, ticks aren't falling out of trees.

You know, they're probably crawled up to your neck to get into your hairline. They're not falling out of trees. We did a study where we were looking at ticks on squirrels. And we found a lot of ticks on squirrels. This is in central Pennsylvania. And that got me thinking about ticks on squirrels and ticks on birds. And I'm like, those animals are in trees. So it is possible that some of these ticks that get on these tree-dwelling vertebrates may fall out of the trees.

But they probably didn't get them, get into that tree themselves. Is there one species of squirrel in particular that they seem to have more ticks on? We primarily looked at gray squirrels, so the squirrels that's everywhere, but I actually just got sent a photo for one of my grad students who had trapped a few flying squirrels. We're targeting mice, but a few flying squirrels got in there, and they had some big ticks around their ears as well. So, again, I think it's, flying squirrels don't usually get on the ground, so it's probably an accidental encounter for them. But gray squirrels are on the ground a lot. So that's remarkable. When you consider how much time a squirrel spends grooming itself and how quick they seem to be

at removing some foreign object from their fur, that a tick stays long enough. Of course, it's super tiny when it attaches to them. And you say around the ears is a primary location. Yeah. So we actually mapped on the squirrel body where we found it. And we found a good number of them either between the toes. So it's a lot between the toes, up in the ears. Even between the toes where they can so easily clean their toes.

What is going on with these squirrels? They just, I mean, if you think about it, like 70% of folks, some really high number of folks who don't recognize that they have a tick on themselves either. These ticks are stealthy. So, you know, they come in, they have a whole lot of stuff in their saliva that is to suppress the immune system. So they may not even know they're there. Wow. And even deer mice.

Is that one of the carriers of ticks? Yeah, yeah. Because I've seen them run straight up a tree. Yes, they're arboreal too. And a full run. So I don't know. Do they have nests in trees? What are they doing up there?

Yeah. So this is something that I learned when I first started getting into ticks that they are considered semi-arboreal. And I had a colleague appear at the time who did some Ph.T. Research where she actually put collars, GPS collars on white-footed mice to track where they were going. And she found about 50% of them nest in like fallen logs and such. And then the other 50% are up in trees. So they will go up trees.

That's remarkable. So if somebody found a tick and they get a picture of it or they get a specimen, does Penn State offer a identification service for them? Like is there someplace they could send those images? Yeah. So if you have a specimen that you want just to be ID'd or, like you said, if you take a good photo, really not fuzzy, good photo. We have a tick identification lab and Dr. Michael Skavarla is the tick ID guru. He'll do all their arthropods too. If you're in the state of

Pennsylvania and you find an interesting bug or have a problem with an insect of any way, he will ID those for you and it's a free service. If you want those ticks tested for pathogens, that has to go to the Pennsylvania Tick Lab, and they'll do that for free as well. Oh, free testing. Free testing in Pennsylvania, yep. So, in fact, while we're on that topic, because this is very important, I'm always kind of amazed that someone finds a tick on their body after it's fully engorged. Basically, it's been there for a couple of days.

I don't think a lot of people understand how long it takes for a tick to feed. There is kind of a sweet spot where you could remove a tick and not suffer. ill effects or at least reduce the chances for contracting some pathogen from the tick. Can you describe that to us and what is the kind of window of opportunity to find and remove a tick? Right. So the window of opportunity is usually described for the pathogen Borrelia burgdorferi, which is what causes Lyme disease. And the way we figured that out, scientists figured that out, is because it kind of, the pathogen kind of hangs out in the tick's body and is when they start to bite, those salivary glands send a signal to the pathogen, hey, hey, it's your time.

Show up now. And it takes a little bit of time for them to get back to the salivary glands to then be transmitted to the person. So that window of opportunity is usually given as 24 hours. So if you can get the tick off before that 24 hour mark, you are at less risk for that. pathogen transfer to have happened. That doesn't mean it can't happen. It's just a less of a risk. This is not the case for other pathogens that are associated with tick. So Babesia causing babesiosis, anaplasma with anaplasmosis, poissin virus, they say can transmit in as little as 15 minutes. Obviously things like alpha-gal are about the tick biting, not about a pathogen.

So it is a good rule of thumb, but it is wise to keep in mind not to be, I have 24 hours. You really want to try and do your tick checks and all your prevention stuff before as soon as you can. Okay, so you found a tick. What is the best removal method? Because there's a lot of advice out there about Vaseline and fingernail, polish and all these other things, can you describe the best method for reducing your exposure? Yes, absolutely. So I'm going to start with the myth I grew up with from my mom, which was when you take, when you remove the tick, don't leave the head in your body. And so I was all paranoid about

this, that the so-called tick head. And then, you know, when I got into ticks, I'm like, ticks don't even have a head. They have mouth parts in a body. They don't, they don't have a head. Black-legged ticks don't even have eyes. And if you looked where the eyes are and Lone Star ticks, it would kind of freak you out because they're basically one giant head. So ticks don't have a head. They have mouth parts. And it's not a problem if those mouth parts are left in you. Your body will reject them.

They'll push them out kind of like a splinter. So the biggest thing you want to keep in mind as you're removing the tick is that you want to try and make this as little strength. for the tick as possible, which I know sounds to be most times people are like, I want to murder this thing. But while that tick is feeding, as we've talked about, it may be pushing material into your body. So if you squeeze that tick, if you stress that tick and they are trying to get out, you know, stress it with a match or it feels suffocated and they're trying to get out real fast, they may regurgitate into you. And that's not the direction you want those pathogens going. So the best way to remove a tick is to grab it as close to your skin as possible and you just pull straight

up, slowly just straight up and it'll just pop right off. And you can do this with tweezers or forceps. The CDC has recently put up guidance to say, you can just use your fingers. So you don't have to get any fancy tools. You can just grab it real close and just pull it up. It's better to get it off than it is to try and rummage to find something pointy. Things like that. like Vaseline. I've heard fire. I've heard cold spoons nail polish remover. Cold spoons. Yep. Yep. Freeze it off, I guess. So like take a cold spoon and put it on it like it takes one and a half seconds just to grab it and pull. Yeah. That is very interesting. Okay. So now you have this tick. You pulled it off

and you have concerns. You want to identify it. What's the best way to preserve it and present it to someone who has some authority about tick identification. Yeah, so one of the things, if you're really interested, if you're concerned how long that tick has been on you, you can take a marker and just circle the area where the tick bite was, so you can watch it. Because obviously things like Lyme disease, a bull's eye rash, doesn't happen to everybody, but it's one of the first indicators. So it'll give you a reminder of where that was.

But you have the tick. You have a couple options. You can dispose of the tick. You can stick it in the freezer. I always recommend A to label it. So you know when it came off and what it is. And B, if you have any roommates or anybody who lives with you, please let them know that you have this in the freezer because that can be kind of a shock to folks.

Speaking of somebody who put a lot of bugs in the freezer, but it can be, you just want to make sure everybody knows that it's there. And in that way, you have kept the tick available for testing if you want to have it tested. down the road. You can immediately send it off to be tested as well. As I mentioned, the PA tick lab is one of those places you can get that done. The big caveat is if that tick comes back positive for some pathogens, that does not mean you are going to get sick. And if it comes back negative, that does not mean you won't get sick. It is just guidance for you and your health care provider if you were to start feeling not quite right that this tick potentially what the tick

was and that it potentially could have had pathogens. And that's an area you touched on the diagnostics. In other words, when physicians encounter a patient that has the bullseye and they may have symptoms that are associated with Lyme disease, they're actually having a very difficult time, even narrowing that and getting those tests positive and avoiding false positives. There's a lot of work to be done. Has there been progress? I mean, how much better off are we now than we were 10 years ago when it comes to working with something like that?

So with some of the tick-borne diseases, it is not as challenging. So bobezia and anaplasma are blood-borne, so they hang out and. blood cells and it's much easier to diagnose those. Borrelia, which is again, Lyme disease, is challenging because it's a bacteria, it's a weird bacteria and it hides out in places in your body. It's what it does in the tick's body too. It hides in certain places. It doesn't like the blood. So it's really challenging for us to get good samples. One of the great places to test from is the spleen. Well, it's challenging to be like, hey, can I take a spleen biopsy, you know, especially for kind of routine testing.

So it is challenging, and there haven't been as many steps forward as I think folks would like. So a lot of the time treatment comes down to the symptoms and exposure potential and doctors who are looking for it. So if you're in places where it's less likely that Lyme disease is, is a lot of. diagnosis, physicians are usually less likely to consider that as a diagnosis. And I think that's one of the biggest challenges is not just the testing, but getting physicians to do testing for it. So right now what they use is a two-step anybody test. And it's challenging because you may, you may have already been previously infected. So that just tells you that your body's responding to

the pathogen. It doesn't tell you about active. infection. And if you got a tick bite, it can take several weeks for your body to go, I know how to fight this now, or I'm currently fighting this. So there's, yeah, the diagnostics are not fantastic. Yikes. And is it true? Is Lyme disease from Lyme, Connecticut? So that was the focal point of the original cluster of juvenile arthritis cases, which is what they thought it was originally was in Lyme, Connecticut. And then from there, they were able to find this pathogen, and they called it Lyme disease because of that cluster. But it's not from there. We actually just had a wonderful webinar that was given by Kirby Stafford and Rob Smith.

Kirby's at Connecticut Experiment Experiment Station, and Rob Smith is at Maine Health. And they kind of, they were around during this discovery process, but they presented some great data on ice men that had, were diagnosed with Lyme disease, you know, they were 10,000 years old. So it's been around for a really long time. Okay, so we have a national competition, let's say. We're take hunters and we want to go to the most target-rich environment across the United States, which state has the most ticks. The most ticks.

Which species? Doesn't matter. Just numbers. All right. If we're going for sheer numbers, I would probably go probably to Arkansas, Georgia area, and I'd be looking for lone star ticks. Somewhere in the south. Wait a second.

The lone star tick is in Arkansas and Georgia? Oh, yeah. It's primarily. It sounds like a Texas name. What is happening? That is true. There are folks who are like, how did a Texas tick get up here? So it's just named Lone Star because of that dot, you know, a single star.

That's disappointing. There are Lone Star ticks in Texas too. So they do have them. Okay. So now the ticks, since they have this weight and ambush style of attaching themselves to a host, how long do they survive without us? host. Yeah. So I'll clarify, the weight and ambush is really primarily the, the black legged or deer tick. The lone star tick is they will hunt you down. They will run towards you. So they're a

lot more aggressive. Those are questers, right? Questing ticks. They're all quite, they will all quest, but lone star ticks will actively move towards you. Black like it ticks don't so much. Black Legated Ticks can live a pretty long time. So they live on their stored energy reserves. And they become their behavior changes a little bit. We've noticed this in the lab. The longer they go without a host blood meal. But we've seen them, you know, we keep them in the lab for various reasons.

And we've seen them a year later just hanging out, just waiting. So they can live a pretty long time. Usually what kills them is not lack of a blood meal. It's environmental stress or predators. So you're probably not getting year old ticks in the field, but they can hang out and wait for a good period of time. So climate-wise, if it were a real arid or dry area, you mentioned that they suffer from dehydration. So those areas would not support a wild colony of ticks without hosts. Yeah, they wouldn't support a wild colony of the ticks that we have in the northeast.

There are plenty of ticks that do really well in those communities. They tend to be commensals and boroughs and places where they can be protected. Oh, good news. So the desert southwest, not safe. A little bit safer from the ones that we, the pathogens we care about from like a human perspective. But when we were in Albuquerque, we definitely saw. lots of ticks on the desert hairs that were out there. Another animal that you would think would groom itself constantly.

So do you know anything about the value of the opossum for controlling ticks? We have to address it. It's the elephant in the room and so many people seem to believe that. I have my own thoughts about it just because we have possums here. And I don't think they're encountering enough ticks to be a control. I have free-ranging chickens. I know that they're eating everything within 18 inches of the ground. But I have my doubts about an opossum, so I'd like to hear it from you.

I can give you the most recent up-to-date on both chickens and possum. So the possum story came out in response to a study that was looking at basically what ticks can be supported on what wildlife. And so they put in, I'm paraphrasing this study. There was a lot more that went into this study. And the purpose of it was not to figure out who eats the most ticks. It was who supports ticks. So they put a lot of ticks on different animals. And at the end of it said, this is how many ticks ended up on those animals.

And with the possums, so these animals were confined. They were not free roaming animals. They were confined. And what they found was that the possums destroyed a good number of the ticks. And that's where that number, people took that to say, oh, look, possums are eating 3,000 ticks a day. But that wasn't the purpose of the study, and that's not what happened. It's just when you keep an animal confined and they have nothing else to do but groom. You know, like that's what happened.

So subsequently, this has been floated around for a while. There was a group that went and did a whole bunch of necropsies on wild opossums and did not find a single one with a tick in its stomach contents. So it is not likely that possums are just completely avoiding ticks. They probably groom them off when they encounter them, but they are not like the dust busters of ticks in the forest floor. They're not actually eating them if they couldn't find them in the scat. Yeah, they're unlikely to be eating them on as a,

nutritional supplement. They're probably cleaning them off, but they're not out there rummaging for them. Where was that study done? Was that a, was that pencil? Where was that? That's a great question. I do not remember. I believe it was at a vet school, but don't quote me on that. I may be gaslighting myself on that. But it deals with a particular animal. So yeah. And you said you did know something about the chickens. I'm dying. Yeah. So that's another one that's come up a lot of folks who are like get free range chickens, get guinea fowl. And so I have some colleagues down at Old Dominion University who wanted to see what happened. See what happens. This is with Guinea Fowl.

And what they found basically was the Gini Fowl do eat ticks, but they also feed ticks. So the ticks that they couldn't reach would feed off of them off their head. And so it was it was not recommended as a method. If you have them, don't get rid of them. but it was not recommended as a method to control ticks. They generally only find the larger ticks, the adults. They're not looking for the very, very small nymphs, which are usually not in the areas where the chickens are anyway or the guinea fowl.

So it could be helpful in some spaces, especially if you have courtyards and things like that, but you also want to be very careful. If you're feeding the chickens, that grain, that feed can draw in rodents, which are also hosts for TICs. So it's a net probably zero. That is not what I wanted to hear. I'm sorry.

You get X. But I am glad that we've touched on this because often people living in rural parts of the country hear about, especially the Guinea Fowl, and let me just tell you, do not get a flock of guineas just because you want tick control. Your neighbors will hate you. Yes. They make the Chi-Chi-Chi sound. They can fly a thousand yards.

They go anywhere they want. And not worth the trade-off while we're talking. And feed your chickens inside the chicken coop only. Do not put feed outside of your coops because, as described here, rodentskin comes cooting along. Yeah. So I'm glad we touched on that. A little disappointing, though. And so the other thing is, now I want to catch some ticks.

Yeah. So what's my best method? I'm in northwestern Pennsylvania and I'm in the country. I live on a dirt road. We have lots of forest area. What's my best method for, you mentioned some interesting things here. One is that they could be attracted to specific vibrations that they sense. I don't think we're going to be able to put a transducer out there and get them to come scooting along and just harvest a bunch of ticks.

Yeah, which would be cool if we could. but then we'd only get those that respond to that frequency. Ferramones, you mentioned CO2. Sometimes people put out CO2 traps for mosquitoes and things like that. But what if we're impatient and we need a tick right away for identification and photographing and things like that? That sounds like a very specific question. Yeah.

So there are two ways there's the way we do surveillance of ticks, which is a method called dragging, and it's not complicated. So we take a one meter by one meter, one yard by one yard roughly. Piece of corduroy. You can also use felt or rubberized felt. And we attach it to a rope or pole and then a rope and we drag it flat across the ground or over bushes or whatever.

And we walk about 10 yards or so and then we gently flip it over because the ticks may fall off. we gently flip it over, and then we can pick up ticks that way. Super easy. The other way, which may or may not be useful to folks, it's something you've got to know that you're doing, is to wear some light clothing and just go for a walk

and bring a lint roller with you, and you can collect them that way, just right off your body. So if you don't want to go to the hassle of creating this drag, the drag has a little bit more surface area than your legs, but you will grab some just by walking through, shrubby areas. What's the best color of that fabric? It's a great question. So this is something, you know, scientists are learning all the time. And we kind of had this speech. We'd say, we're light colored clothes, tuck them into your socks, that kind of thing. And I just learned

the other day that several years ago, they had done some studies in Europe where they had found more ticks on light colored clothing than dark colored clothing. And I'm like, that's weird. Ticks don't even have eyes. Like, why would they even know? So I got really suspicious. But apparently one of the CDC Centers of Excellence has been doing some work on this in the Midwest, and they used light and dark colored drags. So instead of using a light colored cloth, they used a dark colored one as well. And they found the same thing. And then they put ticks in the lab on light and dark colored cloths. And they found that ticks fell off the dark colored cloths more than the light. They were significantly easier to see. So they had folks trying to

to see if they could see how many on the dark colored clothing versus light, and they found, they found them more on the light color clothing. But it seems like there may be more ticks staying on light colored clothes. So it's kind of like a risk. Could you want to see them better, or do you want fewer potentially on you? So we're changing our messaging a little bit to get away from the color of clothing and just start going to treat your clothes with permethrin. treat your clothes with perme that's your bottle yeah i know we're not we're not endorsing a product here

but i did bring this with me this is um a tick to turn is this have promethrin and that's it yep okay so i got this for my sister-in-law who just lives across the road for me she's got three ticks on her body this year and uh so this is important to teach people i don't think we should treat our entire yard especially depending on where you live that's impossible to do. And if you're a wanderer or if you're a questing human, if you're a questing human, you're going to go out into the environment. So what's the best way to protect ourselves without kind of going overboard? My grandson's paranoid because once he learns about ticks and that they're out there, he thinks he just can't go anywhere.

Yeah, don't do that. The wild is such a wonderful place to be. And in nature is so wonderful. So we definitely don't want folks being scared to go outside. And there are things you can do to help protect yourself. And I would say, I get asked, what's the number one thing? The number one thing you can do is use repellent and use permethrine. They are two different things. So I'm going to talk about premethrine first. So permethrine was developed for the military.

I mean, the permethrine wasn't. I say permethrin treated clothing was developed for the military. And now it's standard issue for all servicemen and women that they get permethrin treated clothing as part of their attire. And so what this is, it's a specialized form of permethrin. This is not the livestock permethrin. You go and get it tractor supply. It is specialized to bind to the fabric that it's treated with, or you treat it with. So that means once it dries, it's going to stay there for the most part.

And I mean the most part because it'll eventually wear off. So if you treat it yourself, it lasts about five to six washes. You can get clothing treated professionally. There are certain companies where you can either send your clothes and they'll treat them or you can buy already treated clothes. And those will last about 70 washes or so. But it's really easy to get, there's several companies that have fabric permethrin. And you spray your clothes.

It's that simple. And you don't really have to think about it. I usually layer that with a repellent on top of that. So you can use Diet. I know a lot of folks don't love Diet. I don't love Deet. I don't love how it feels. It's greasy.

There's other products out there. So there's... It can melt plastic. Well, yeah, I can melt plastic. It wasn't, but yeah. And folks are worried about safety of Deet, but like any safety issues that have come up was because people ingested it. So just don't drink it.

You'll be okay. But it is very safe. It's the reference standard used by the WHO and the EPA for not only efficacy but safety. I just don't like the way it feels. So I use Picardin. I like Picardin a lot. That's just another active ingredient. It's in a lot of different labels.

There's oil of lemon eucalyptus, not the essential oil of lemon eucalyptus, but the actual compound. It's called PMD is what they usually abbreviate it to. and it's the synthesized version of the plant oil. And then there's one called IR3535. But that one's really effective as well. These are all EPA registered actives. They come in a variety of different labels and companies use them.

But you can go on the EPA website and you can do, they have a repellent search tool that you can, like, these are things that I value and it'll come up with some options. But I do always recommend EPA registered. It means it's been tested for, for safety. It's been tested for how well it works. So I usually use, those are my go-toes. So permethrin treated clothes and repellent. So we're making a distinction. Permethrin, does that mean that kills them? So permethrine has a, it's a little bit dual action. It has a little bit

of repellent effects. So what happens is when they, when the ticks or mosquitoes, it works for mosquitoes too or really anything lands on anything that's permethrin treated, they get a little hot foot. So it's a neural, it's a neurological effect. And so sometimes they'll just fall off because, you know, you can just be like, oh my God, it's almost like an electric shock to them. You know, they just don't want to be on that product. If you expose them to permethrine long enough, so say a tick walks under a shirt that's been treated with permethrin and has contact with permethrine long enough, it could kill them. Wow, that's sad.

Is it, though? Well, here's the thing. Let's say, not to be too weird, but it's like, what if you want to, I, because I keep Pet Verro Destructor Mites, so I find out under what conditions they last the longest, the perfect humidity, temperature, and all of that. So let's say I want pet ticks. I want to keep them in an enclosure for observation. What conditions would maximize?

their longevity in captivity without feeding on an animal. Yeah, so we keep them in little polyurethane vials at 95% humidity in the dark. Now, if you want to keep them for a really long time, you put that temperature down to about 15 degrees Celsius or so, and they'll hang out for a really, really long time. If you want to keep them in a more natural behavior pattern, usually around 75 Fahrenheit, so about 24, 25 Celsius or so, is like a sweet spot, really high humidity. If you're putting them in a terrarium where you can keep that humidity really high, they would love some leaf litter. They would love a little, you know, grass stem or two in there. How do you know they want leaf litter and a grass stem?

Well, I don't know they want it, but they... Okay. They will go into the leaf litter and come back up. Okay, that's interesting. So if we want to test their mobility, so fastest moving tick, which one has? What's the most agile tick out there? So there are, if you go on YouTube, or search YouTube, there's a couple tick races that have been done. What are you done?

Yeah, you can watch them. You can watch them go. Fastest tick in the Northeast is going to be the Lone Star Tick. Really? The second only, or the only, the second one that may give the Lone Star take a run for its money is the American dog tick. But Lone Stars, they're focused. They are focused. Okay.

And when they did this race, how are they baiting the ticks? Or they just put them in a spot and see how quickly they figure out on it. Yeah, they kind of put them in a spot and let them. Now, they created, so my team did a race here. There's another group up in Rhode Island, Tick Encounter, that did a race. And so all you have to do is breathe on them. They follow the CO2. And so you just stand at one end breathing and they'll run at you.

That's very comforting. Now, if we can make that a full screen shot, a cinema sequence of a tick running at us, I can already see that. Do ticks make, how do they communicate with one another? So let's talk about the life cycle of a tick. Are there male and female? and if there are, how do they find one another in this environment that they're out? Most ticks are male and female, the exception of ticks that we're concerned about being the Asian Longhorn tick, which is parthenogenic, so there's only females.

But most of the other ticks that we talk about are male and female. So the life cycle of a tick, when they come out in the year is a little bit, on the species of tick in terms of their life stages when the life stages are active. For black-legged ticks or deer ticks, the life sequence is typically, so adults will lay eggs sometime in the spring. Those will hatch as larvae in the late summer into fall. And then they overwinter. And then they'll take a blood meal somewhere in there, so they'll feed on something.

and then in the following spring, so it's already been a year. Following spring, they will molt into the next life stage, which is a nymph. I'll take another blood meal, and then they molt again into the adult stage. So the whole life cycle takes about two years. It can be accelerated a little depending on how quickly they find their blood meal, and it can be delayed a little bit along the same lines. But most of these, we call three host ticks because they feed three times. take it's about three years not all of them some are much shorter um but yeah it takes a lot longer

than i think folks realize the adults when they're searching for um each other usually find each other on a host so that's why we call deer a keystone reproductive host especially for blacklegic ticks because they are the host where the adults will mate the female feeds drops off and lays eggs They can do this on a lot of different animals, but they just, a deer feeds a lot more ticks than, say, a fox does. So, you know, there's a lot more of them out there. They do use pheromones. A lot of the pheromones haven't been characterized yet for these species. So in some species they have and some haven't. So they can use sex pheromones to find each other. And they use other pheromones too. So they have aggregation pheromones. So,

some species will clump together because they recognize each other and they'll aggregate. And we think that they do that because especially on small animals, if you have more of you, more ticks on an animal, less, you know, the animals will clean off some, but some will get missed. And the more that bite means the more immunosuppressants are being pushed into that animal. So the more successful they may be. So there's lots of, lots of reasons for these different things. So we had this really long winter with snow cover throughout the entire winter. Does the snow cover benefit the ticks or fail to wipe them out in wintertime? Because we put them in the freezer to kill them.

So how come doesn't work outside? Yeah. So that's one of the hypotheses for why some areas may be seeing more ticks around early is because we did have those really cold. I mean, I think it was the coldest winter I've ever had. in Pennsylvania. I'm from Maine, so it's not the coldest winter I've had, but in Pennsylvania, definitely the coldest. But we did have that snow cover. So we had that insulation protecting the leaf litter in areas where those ticks over winter or rodent nests that we haven't had necessarily for

long periods of time in the past. So snow cover definitely has that insulating effect. So now I'm going to ask you to balance this out. and make a case in favor of ticks. What's good about them? Yeah. So when we were doing some, we were doing some research looking at grooming behavior of mice. So like how many ticks are taken off by mice. And we found when ticks were allowed to just crawl on mice and mice were allowed to freely groom them,

that the mice ate about 50% of those ticks. And I do think for birds, for rodents, for other arthropods, for spiders and other soil-dwelling predators, ticks are a critical part of their ecology. And on top of that, we view parasites as being very bad and a welfare concern, but in the greater scheme of ecology, they are population regulators. They help maintain population numbers of animals that may, you know, like pathogens, diseases are naturally part of regulation cycles. So those are ways to look at ticks. You know, we think of them as we don't want to tick on us, which is fair. But in the greater ecology of the world, they do have a role.

Do we know which wild bird species are the best tick hunters? I don't know if we know which are the best. There's a lot of the ground dwelling birds, robins, for example, some wrens and some other birds that hang on the ground that will eat them. But again, they'll also feed them. So that relationship is unknown, to my knowledge. Okay, all the ticks are gone. Nobody cares about them.

The environment is completely distilled. what do you work on next? So I have a special love for flies. So that was what my original work was on. My original graduate work was on was flies. So I'm a horse person. I grew up with horses. There are flies everywhere.

And there are still flies everywhere. So that's my go-to is flies and livestock facilities. Oh my gosh. Horse flies, deer flies. Yeah, horse flies, deer flies. From the horses perspective, because I see the horses over here with those screens on their heads all summer long. Yep. What is the worst pest for a horse as far as the fly species go?

Is it the horse fly? I would say absolutely. It's a group we call tabanity, so horse and deer flies. They are challenging because they don't really respond to any of the repellents that we have. They're aggressive. They are really good. flyers and horses struggle getting them off, and they're also very strong biters. So stable flies and hornflies also bite, but they're much more of a nuisance.

I don't see my horses react worse to anything. They really respond strongly to horse and deer flies. Wow. So now, I can't remember ever being bothered by a horse fly. We see them around, and they're impressive because they're so big, and they have those cutting mouth parts, but we are impacted by the deer flies. What can you tell us about the risks of that or maybe the best to turn? So, so I, you know, there hasn't been as much work done with horse and deer flies. I think primarily because they're not huge vectors of pathogens. They're just

nuisance spiders. So most of the, what I'm about to say is coming from anecdotal experience of folks working in areas where they get bothered. So one of the interesting parts about the biology of horse and deerflies is that they're territorial. So they develop in water systems, but if you have a horse or you're working in one space, you can walk to the other side of the paddock or maybe the next paddock over and be out of that territory, and they won't follow you. They just will stay in their space. So that's why, you know, if you're riding or you're walking in the woods and you come in, there's a fly bothering you and then you walk out of it. They just, they won't continue to follow you. So some of it is just doing activities in areas where they're not around. Some of the other

recommendations have been to use deterrence. So from the equine world, they have these little dragonflies on hooks that they have recommended to put on the bridle of the horse or your hat. Does that work? I don't know. I don't. I honestly. don't know. I haven't tried. I bought them. They are hanging out in my trailer right now. And I'm waiting for seasons because we have a big problem at the barn that I'm at. I'm waiting for the season to start because I want to know. I don't know the answer to that. So you have a 3D dragonfly that you're going to put on the bridle. Yep. It has a clip. It came with a clip.

And the fly should see that and know, uh-oh, that's a predator that might eat me. So I'm not going to bite this worse. That's the prevailing theory. And you know what? I'm going to test. it before I discount it because I don't know. You're going to do an actual mini study on that. Well, we actually talked about this with the Penn State Equestrian or our equine team for extension. And it was something we wanted to see if we had, if we could get like community scientists to do this and see, you know, did it reduce in, you know, it's perception. We can do counts, but I just wanted to see if this was worth pursuing. So that was definitely

one that, um, that was interesting to me. I have a lot of equestrian friends. I do a question. in photography. Yep. If I had something new to offer them like that that would be novel and keep those screens off, keep them from having to put those on their horses. Yeah. That would be fantastic. It sounds too easy, though.

Yeah, and I don't know, you know, so a lot of the face masks, the fly masks are really not to deter horse and deer flies. They're to deter house flies and face flies. Because they get on their eyes and stuff. They get on their eyes. Yeah. Yeah, so it's more of a deterrent for that. But those masks actually have dual purpose.

So some horses, like I have a horse that has white sclera. So he's got more white in his eye than some others. And so I use them for UV protection in the summer as well. So if you have a horse with a white blaze or pink skin, it can be helpful for that. Okay, so we're coming to the end of this conversation. And I want to thank you so much for your time. This has all been very, very interesting to me personally. and I hope that those who are listening and watching also get something out of it.

But I'd like you to share something that you've learned that was a real aha moment. Maybe it's something you had to predispose thought about, that you were just really, the actual results were very striking and different from what you expected. In relation to ticks or in general? Anything, any living thing. I think one wake-up call for me, it was one of the first projects I ever did when I got my own lab and I was getting all set up and I'd worked you know this is a fly question I'd worked with flies and I got asked by horse owners um what fly spray should I use so we'll we'll do the test and I'm

going to tell them nothing works so we we because everyone wants to have a natural product right a natural product over a synthetic product so we brought in three natural products and four synthetic products and I was convinced I'm like natural products don't work and I'll say that these were commercially available natural products. So they were synthesized, no numbers and quantities of what's in there. So not just like homemade blends. But we did the test with house flies. And sure enough, like two of the three, what I would call natural products lasted for a day to two days. And our synthetic products lasted for 15 minutes. And I was like, that's a wake up call. I need, like, I need to recognize that, you know, I'm testing these and I may be shocked by these results

that I was. And so now, you know, when I talk to horse owners in particular, I can give more specific recommendations on repellents and what to look for because of that. But I thought about just discounting it. Like, they're never going to work. And I'm like, no, sure enough, it did. So. Well, that is super interesting. One last thing about yourself that nobody knows. One skill you have or some ability, something that would surprise people to know about you. My unrecognized skill that my husband always says is I'm really good at recognizing voices.

So like when people do voiceovers or like cartoon voices, I can the certain ways people pronounce. It's like people can recognize handwriting. For some reason, I can just. hear that. So that is my skill that'll never be useful in anything at all ever. So you'll be working for the CIA scene. Yeah, maybe that's right. Right up there with the lip readers. Right. Okay. Well, thank you again so much. This has been a really good exchange. And I just want to tell you, I appreciate your time. Of course. And don't forget, those that are listening, we'll put links down to the video description for you to follow up on a lot of the things that we

talked about here. So thanks and have a very good week. weekend. Thanks everyone. And that wraps up another episode of interviews with experts. Please don't forget to visit the description for additional information and links that you may find helpful. I'm Frederick Dunn and this has been The Way to Be interviews with experts.