Complaint, Journalism: There seems to be an endless supply of "Yet Another Tick Menace!" news stories. But none of those stories ever seem to mention what natural predators ticks might have.
Some of those creatures are facing substantial habitat loss in the US, and some are not. I am not an ecologist, but I think the bulk of the problem is probably a few steps up on the food chain. We have basically extirpated the predators (wolves, coyotes, foxes) who prey on the animals (mice, deer, other rodents) who spread ticks in many urban and suburban environments.
but I think the bulk of the problem is probably a few steps up on the food chain.
My understanding is that climate change is possibly a bigger factor. The ever warmer winters means that less of the eggs die off in sub-freezing weather. More of the early life cycle hosts (e.g. small mammals like mice, rats, voles) survive the winter.
Coyote at least has urbanized in southern california. Huge packs roam neighborhoods every night. Plenty of ample food from scavenging and live prey. No predators. No human hunting or seemingly any state sponsored culling.
Yep, coyotes are hardy, we have some in NYC as well [0]. Having said that, Wildlife Services kills tens of thousands annually [1] and wolves inhabit a much smaller range their historical distribution [2].
Instead of extirpated, I might have said "extirpated or highly curtailed the territory of"
My main objection is to the tone. Especially in this story - which alludes to the new ticks draining entire cows of their blood. Yet fails to mention "DEET can be pretty effective" or "check your skin after spending time outdoors" basics. It's hardly specific to this article, or to this topic - but there's a "you are helpless" tone to a great deal of modern journalism. It's almost as if they wanted everyone cowering in fear inside their houses, and spending all of their time clicking on yet more articles on the web...
If I had $2 for every time I heard a news story about how some kind of honey bee variant was going to wipe out the US as we know it, I could go ahead and retire. Keep in mind I stopped watching TV around 17 years of age.
Now in my mid 30s, I know exactly 0 individuals who have ever had an issue with bee swarms of any kind.
Meanwhile I grew up in an area with what is known as "RIFA", a variety of ant imported to North America. Despite being immensely painful and aggressive the consensus is to avoid them when possible and to use ant killer if need be to remove them from areas near the house. No one reports on the fact that native ants in many areas have been completely extirpated by this invasive species.
Yes, popular media and journalism wants you afraid. It makes them more money when you're afraid, and reading/watching them to find out what to panic about next. This is not a conspiracy.
It's a feedback loop. Write a panic article, people read it and get scared, people read more panic articles to be informed about new threats. Rinse. Repeat.
I hate it so very much. And one of the main things I hate is that this panicky nonsense has led the entire US into being rounded, padded, and soft for kids today. Not that they need to suffer, by any means, but they do need unstructured time away from competition, and away from the prying eyes of their parents. But because media and news has convinced everyone to be terrified of everything all the time, this is the way of it.
In other news, I'm shaking my fist at a cloud in my front yard.
It is often said that having chicken in the garden will decrease the tick population in that area. I personally am not convinced that this is due to the chicken eating them though - it is more likely due to the fact that the garden will be fenced keeping wild animals away (who spread them.) Chicken are also very territorial, so that adds to it.
Chickens will eat insects voraciously if given the opportunity. They are programmed to wander around all day stabbing their beaks at anything that moves or looks like it might be able to move.
Guess: That will depend on the breed of chicken. "Optimized" modern breeds (high weight/low cost/fast-to-market) may be lacking in aptitudes (such as bug eating) which industrial-scale agriculture doesn't value.
Nah, I've seen these optimized breeds wader around, they will scratch and peck their outdoor enclosures nearly bare looking for bugs to eat. They are still chickens at the end of the day, as long as they are healthy enough to move around.
It's kind of like thinking modern breeds of cow would lose the ability to eat grass or pigs to forage. That stuff is hard-wired pretty deep because it is at the very core of survival.
But these chickens (such as broilers) are "in the house" rather than "in the garden." It may be worth having free range chickens for pest control and other purposes.
This article makes it sound like the entire country is about to be infested by these ticks and they will kill all of the livestock and give everyone tickborn diseases.
However these tics have been around since 2017 so I'm assuming there's some limitation that isn't mentioned in the article that has stopped them from taking over.
You are probably mistaking ticks with viruses. Ticks are not viruses. Ticks have to travel from places to places and then spend a long time in one place to multiply and establish a colony. Ticks themselves do not fly, they need to be carried by the host animal. It takes time for them to travel long distances especially when the host is a farm animal that can't roam freely long distances. And even once they travel somewhere, it would probably take couple of seasons to spread locally and establish large numbers.
So I see no logical contradiction by saying "these ticks have been around since 2017" and "entire country is about to be infested".
The old math question asks, "Duckweed is spreading on a lake. It takes 1 year to double the area of duckweed. From start to end, it took 15 years to cover entire lake. Which year the duckweed covers half of the lake?"
Exponential growth has this feature that for a long time it seems fine and then suddenly it is over as it overload's the physical capacity to handle it.
And I would say 7 years to get to the current state is extremely fast rate and definitely cause for alarm in my opinion.
My understanding of exponential growth is that if a tick produces a thousand offspring every year over 7 years you would have around 1e+21 ticks.
The milky way is only 1e+18km wide.
This would suggest at present our solar system should be a massive sphere of infinitely expanding ticks dwarfing out all light, life and matter and further expanding into the cosmos and in another few years of tick exponential growth will overwhelm the milky way with tick mass, and then eventually not long after the entire universe will just become a large sphere of infinitely expanding ticks.
And apprently ticks can reproduce more than 1000 offspring and also can live more than one year so this is a conservative estimate.
Unless the big bang was tick based....something's not adding up here.
Or possibly you and the journalist dont fully appreciate how big exponential growth really is.
One factor might be that reproduction rate ≠ survival rate, i.e., not all of the ticks born will reproduce. For example, it usually takes several growth stages for ticks to reach fertility, where each of these phases require a blood meal. So if they don’t find a suitable host in time, they starve to death. Or they are eaten themselves by another predator, etc.
The article says that one Asian longhorned tick “can lay up to 2,000 eggs without needing to mate” (emphasis mine). This doesn’t imply that this tick breed generally has an effective reproduction rate of 2000, let alone that this rate was annual.
As fun as "a massive sphere of infinitely expanding ticks dwarfing out all light" sounds, we unfortunately cannot have more ticks than the biomass needed to support them, including their own. Also, this kind of assumes an infinite supply of cows/people/other juicy critters, which brings its own problemas.
Ticks don’t care about the Tragedy of the Commons (livestock grazing one area with multiple owners not responsible for the land means they eat everything).
Tick population will level off once the resource (blood) is maxed out.
So according to my original comment observation, there are limitations on this tick growth which the article leaves out in favor of fear based journalism.
Because they leave out important info it makes it hard to judge appropriate response which makes it clear clickbait to be ignored.
So yes, there are limitations on this tick growth. The article does not leave it -- they mention ticks essentially draining cows from their blood. This is the limit of how many ticks a cow can support, biologically.
If they've been here only 7 years and are now found in states from Ohio to Connecticut (mentioned specifically in the article), I'd say the taking over is going pretty well for them.
That doesn't mean they won't hit some natural limitation on their range at some point but it's not obvious to me they're there yet.
> Though Asian longhorned ticks can carry diseases that infect humans, they are not yet considered a threat to human health in the U.S., per the statement.
No it’s not. These ticks are not going to drain herds of cows.
Tick-borne disease is the primary risk. It only takes one bite to get a pretty severe disease. If these don’t carry the tick-borne diseases, they’re a nuisance but not a huge risk.
With regular ticks, it's possible that longterm high rates of exposure causes anemia or heath issues from pathogens. I've simply never heard them cite blood loss from ticks as the acute reason. Supposedly a cow can loose 3L of blood at a time and ticks average about .5mL per feeding. So you'd need 6k fully engorged ticks to loose that much blood to cause problems, and more to actually kill them. I would think most farmers would notice something like that pretty quickly.
> The US seems to have no defense against invasive pests, plant, animal or insect, it just lets them spread.
A large portion of that is inevitably of the US's own doing through its love of intensive agriculture.
Liberal use of hormones and antibiotics in animals, liberal use of pesticides etc. etc.
Not saying no other country in the world uses antibiotics or pesticides, but the US does it more intensively and more extensively than almost any other country on the planet.
You then end up having to fight fire with fire as things build up resistance.
In Europe it's not so much that years get warmer, but that winters are less cold. I expect many parts of the U.S. are similar.
Frost would typically kill a lot of species, except a few that are specialized to withstand it. Withstanding frost is often a trade-off. So if this threat is removed, many native species have a disadvantage.
(I'm beekeeper and many of the threats to native honeybees are because (European) honeybees put a lot of energy into preparation for long periods of frost,while their adversaries don't do that. It's a bit like the story of the Ant and the Grasshopper. Only now it turns out the grasshopper was right all along, in not caring)
this is very much an issue in Canada, where the lack of deeply cold winters allows a bunch of critters, notable mosquitoes, ticks, and the pine beetle, to have explosive population growth in the summers.
the pine beetle in particular is problematic because it will swarm and kill tons and tons of pine trees -- which is fodder for massive forest fires.
Probably the Aedes aegypti. Super invasive mosquito species that are currently spreading across North America. They like to feed during the day and will bite a person several times for their blood meal. Their eggs can remain viable outside of water up to 8 months to a year and they require only a very tiny amount of water to hatch.
There are some government programs to limit the spread. I know there is an Asian longhorn beetle program and some others for invasive plants out west (source my brother worked on them).
It only seems that way if you don't pay attention. For example: https://www.invasivespeciesinfo.gov/take-action , and there's lots of stuff at the state and local levels (if you don't believe me, call your friendly neighborhood extension agent)
Are they actually effective? The above is local to just one town, if the next town over doesn't do anything the weed spreads anyway. There are also areas where no one ever goes like parts of national forests. Have any of these efforts done more than delay an invasive? I'm thinking of kudzu and pine beetles. I wonder if pine beetles are creating more CO2 than cars by killing trees. The problems seem complex and not easily solved, so it would seem the appropriate response would be to train more people who can do studies and find answers. Instead it's left up to local communities to form groups and try brute force approaches.
An example of an effort that has made no progress for 7 years, is getting worse, people are spreading the invasive further, and the experts say there is now no getting rid of it:
You can actually make selective pesticides, but the people that pay for pesticide development can make a lot more money with non-selective pesticides.
Much of the behavior and life cycle of insects is controlled by a variety of hormones. For example suppose you've got an insect that needs to lay its eggs when the weather starts to cool at the end of summer because they eggs will die if it is too hot, but before the weather gets too cold. And suppose that after mating the males die.
There will likely be some hormone that gets triggered by weather changes that will cause the "find a mate and lay eggs" subroutine hard wired into the insect's brain to run. (Much of insect behavior is essentially hard wired routines that get invoked by a complex hormone drive state machine).
If you identify what hormone that is, you might be able to make a pesticide based on it that if you spray it earlier in the summer, when it is still too hot for the eggs, will trigger the "mate and lay eggs" routine. The insects will mate and lay eggs, and the summer heat will kill the eggs. And the males have mated so they die. So when the weather starts to change and the hormone is active again in the females there are no males to mate with them.
Unlike pesticides that work by disrupting something necessary to life in general, which then tend to kill things other than the target either by being sprayed on them, or by things higher in the food chain eating things that were sprayed (or eating things that ate those things, and so on), they hormone pesticides tend to be a lot safer for other species.
That's because the target insect does naturally produce the hormone, so it is already in the food chain. Most other things in the same ecosystems as the target insect will have already evolved to not be too bothered by it.
What holds these kind of pesticides back is that to develop them you have to have researchers who delve very deeply into the biology of the target insect. There are a lot of different insect species, and even if you just care about pest insects there are still a lot, and you've got to do each species separately. There isn't enough funding to produce enough PhD entomologists to get the number of specialists you'd need to do the research.
A similar thing happens with with biological control of pest insects. If you've got an invasive insect that native predators and parasites won't control, one way you might deal with it is bring in its predators or parasites.
Often bringing in non-native predators or parasites is a very bad idea, because they often also go after native species. With insects though it can often be done safely. As with much other insect behavior, what insects predators insects pray upon is often very specific. They might only go after one specific species. Same with parasites. If you've got an insect that is kept under control because some parasitic wasp lays eggs in them, that wasp might lay eggs in only that specific species. If that species becomes invasive somewhere else and you bring in the wasps, they won't hurt anything else.
But to make that work, as with hormonal pesticides, you need to know a whole lot about the predators and parasites of your pest. But there aren't many openings for the PhD entomologists it would take for that.
An example of this was a few decades ago there was some invasive species from I think Florida that was devastating California citrus crops. To try to control it they brought in a parasitic wasp (if I'm correctly remembering this) from Florida that only attacked that species, and is what kept it under control in Florida.
It completely failed in California. It was only years later that anyone figured out why. It turned out that the pest species was actually two very closely related species. So closely related that no one had realized there were two species. And the parasite wasp species was also actually two very closely related species, which was also not known at the time. The two parasite wasp species each only attacked one of the pest species. It turned out the invaders were all from one of the two pest species, and the wasps they captured and brought to California all were from the species that wanted the other pest species.
No one knew about these subspecies before because there were only two entomologists in the whole US who specialized in parasitic wasps. There are many thousands of parasitic wasp species in the US, and neither of those researchers had ever looked closely at these particular ones.
So it sounds like you're basically saying there is no funding so the policy is just let it rip until it becomes a big enough problem. I wonder if the Met52 fungus which is effective against one kind of tick would be effective against others:
Surely this kind of thing is something that could be figured out pretty quickly, although the environmental effects of releasing a fungus across large areas would need to be studied also. I think of all the people in the world who are poor and doing stupid work when they could be trained and working on problems like this. It seems to be not just a shortage of funding but a shortage of imagination.
"Though Asian longhorned ticks can carry diseases that infect humans, they are not yet considered a threat to human health in the U.S., per the statement"
"Can clone themselves" but they don't always. They're also capable of sexual reproduction. The asexual reproduction is the part that's letting them spread so rapidly, though.
What kind of approach do you see here? Yes you can create an infinite amount of samples to test on, but you still have to deal with the millions of copies in the wild.
If it's a copy of the same thing then any measure that works against one would work against all. Other ways of reproduction add randomness and mutations which make it difficult
> any measure that works against one would work against all
Modulo any environmental or self-mutation factors, I suppose? Might be that a tick which sucks blood from deer with XYZ picks up a parasite or bacteria which protects it against your measure. Or one crawls through some chemical goop / radioactive slop / gets hit by a cosmic ray etc. and gets a mutation which helps.
(Both fairly unlikely, I'll grant, but when you're dealing with millions or billions of ticks, unlikely is likely to happen a lot.)
I don't understand this comment. Is it a joke? Why would the cloning matter? All of the clones can clone, which just means laying eggs without finding a mate.
You say it like it was not done before (like with mosquitoes), except now there would be more chance of success because they wouldn't unexpectedly mutate.
But anyway another comment says these ticks also can repro sexually so whatever
Can you link to such a trial? I only know of gm modified new insects, to take over and die (they reproduce a lot, but their offspring dies, so other normal reproduce less).
But of a manufactored virus or bacteria I have not heard yet. And I think it would be way more dangerous.
Weren't mosquitoes about infertility? Making infertile ones that can't effectively reproduce. With something that can clone itself that isn't much of an hurdle...
