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Fuck Ticks

Seriously.
​Image: NIH Bull. No. 171

​Within the greater kingdom or gross and-or horrifying things in nature, ticks hold a special place as diminutive parasites capable of spreading very big and occasionally deadly diseases. As warm-blooded creatures, we are both the breeding and feeding grounds for these fake spiders. And I submit that ticks are the worst, vilest creatures on planet Earth, excepting perhaps viruses, which aren't really creatures.

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Thanks to the West Coast's mild winter, they came early this year. The first one I spotted was mid-February sometime, lodged in the depths of my husky-mutt's thick fur with roughly the appearance of a reddish sunflower seed. With some resistance from said dog (asshole), I managed to yank the subarachnoid out intact, which is a talent. I flushed it down the toilet while wishing there was a less humane option.

Most often, by the time a tick is spotted it's too late. Many species are extremely tiny in their unfed state, where a typical tick would be about the size of a pinhead and bizarrely flat. An engorged tick, meanwhile, might be closer to the size of an eraser (same tick). The size comparison between a fed and unfed tick is thoroughly bizarre, and you can feel free to gross yourself out at tickencounter.org (I won't be joining). Figure that a feeding tick can balloon up to 20 or 50 times that of an "empty" tick, with the result looking like a mouse head stuck on a pig body.

The whole life mission of a tick is to attach itself to some warm blooded creature and extract over a period of hours or even weeks every drop of blood that it might conceivably carry. Ticks have tiny little harpoon-like structures called hypostomus (above), with which they slice open a host's skin and insert into said host's epidermis. Some tick varieties even craft a cement cone of sorts which they use to reinforce the tick-skin interface. The mechanism of attachment is strong enough to make removal precarious—it's often easier to rip the tick in half, leaving the head still attached (which is bad), rather than pull out the entire creature. Like I said, it's a real talent.

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Latching onto a host is the central act of the tick lifecycle. They are what's known as obligate hematophages, which means that without a solid meal of blood, a tick will die and fail to advance to the next stage of tick existence. This lifecycle role varies a bit depending on the category of tick: soft body or hard body (some ticks have a shell of sorts).

"There are major differences in the biology of hard and soft ticks," explains Jerome Goddard in the textbook Infectious Diseases and Arthropods. "Some hard ticks have a one host lifecycle, wherein engorged larvae and nymphs remain on the host after feeding; after they molt, subsequent stages reattach and feed. Adults mate on the host and only engorged females drop off to lay eggs on the ground." Other hard ticks, meanwhile, have a three-host lifecycle (for males), and this too involves ticks mating on their host and females dropping off to lay 18,000 eggs and die. The lifecycle of a hard tick can take a full year to complete.

Soft ticks differ in that they remain attached to a host only briefly and females are capable of multiple reproductive cycles. So, a soft tick might have many bloodmeals during its life.

Ticks are parasites (ectoparasites, properly), which is really the root of their disgustingness (or our disgust with them). Their peers include such luminaries as hookworms, that zombie ant fungus, and plasmodia, the protozoan genus responsible for malaria. Parasites are as naturally repulsive as anything—they feed on us as they become part of us. Shudder.

All that said, ticks get their reputation as disease vectors. Like a mosquito, the whole tick mechanic involves the transportation of blood between different animals. The CDC recognizes 15 primary diseases spread by ticks in the United States. They range from the anemia-inducing anaplasmosis (which invades red blood cells) to the emerging Heartland virus to Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, an infection that can progress to the point of causing paralysis and death. New on the scene is Candidatus Neoehrlichia mikurensis, a bacterial infection that induces blood clotting. Moreover, it's not uncommon for ticks to harbor more than one pathogen at a time, occasionally leading to multiple concurrent infections within a host.

And then there is Lyme disease, of course, which comes courtesy of the bacteria Borrelia burgdorferi. This is the one we're supposed to watch for—the bullseye rash. 300,000 cases appear yearly in the United States, mostly in the Northeast and upper Midwest. On occasion, the infection is fatal, but the result is more likely to be extended misery and possibly long-term impairment. The disease's end stage has been compared to congestive heart failure in its effects: "persistent musculoskeletal pain, neurocognitive symptoms, or dysesthesia, often associated with fatigue," according to a 2001 report in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The body doesn't do well against Lyme disease without outside assistance. The bacteria has evolved methods of getting around the immune system, including the reduction of surface proteins targeted by natural antibodies and an impressive ability to hide in the molecular gunk making up the matrix between the body's various cells. Neurological effects are reasonably common as the bacteria induces programmed cell death among certain supportive cells in the spinal cord and brain, while inducing other cells to produce neurotoxins. It's a bad scene.

There's no longer a Lyme disease vaccine for humans—thanks to the anti-vax crowd, actually—but that's another story. Mostly, we're just supposed wear long pants in the woods and, if a tick does attach itself to some flesh, be super-careful in removing it. Ticks are known to respond to distress by barfing and, if that barf happens to occur underneath the victim's skin, well, that's a pretty good way to ensure whatever bad stuff that tick is carrying around makes its way into your body. In conclusion: Fuck ticks forever.