Fact or myth? Ticks can drop out of trees like paratroopers.
Popular Science...
The official start of summer is days away, and after a particularly long and cold winter in parts of the United States, many are ready to enjoy the outdoors again without risking frostbite. Warm weather comes with another type of bite, however. One that comes with an unwanted guest attached to your body.
Along with mosquitos and flies, ticks are among our most disliked insects. However, their infamy comes with a lot of myths, and with tick season in full swing, it’s important to straighten out a few misconceptions.
False: Ticks can fly
If you’ve heard that ticks can fly and/or jump, you’ll be relieved to know that they can’t. In fact, their legs are pretty unimpressive appendages, according to Escher Cattle, an entomologist at the Regional Government of Cape Cod.
“They have some pretty good grabbers on their front legs and their other legs are pretty decent as well, but really all a tick has the equipment to do is walk around and grab stuff,” Cattle tells Popular Science.. They’re not muscular like those of grasshoppers, for example. As for locomotion more generally, ticks don’t have wings, nor are they aerodynamic. As such, they’re also “not physically geared to be dropping out of trees like some kind of paratrooper.”
While a tick might attach onto an animal that takes it up into a tree and then fall, the chances that the skydiving insect will land on you is infinitesimal, Cattle says. In fact, ticks generally exist beneath an elevation of at most three feet.
The way a tick actually attaches to a host is by climbing to the top of a plant, sticking its arms out, and waiting for something alive to brush by—a behavior called questing. It does so after sensing chemical cues of something warm, moving, and blood-filled.
False: Opossums help remove ticks by eating them
Speaking of blood-filled things, one tick myth that Cattle is sorry to dispel is one that paints opossums as tick-eating machines. You may have read that opossums are good to have around because they eat lots of ticks. This popular notion is founded on the results of a study in which researchers put ticks on opossums, among other animals, to investigate how these animals reacted to the pest.
Because the team wasn’t seeing any ticks dropping off the opossums, they assumed the mammals were eating them all. As of now, there is no direct evidence known to researchers of opossums eating any ticks.
One similar belief is that birds such as turkeys and guinea fowl eat ticks. While that’s true, they also carry them around, so having one in your backyard doesn’t automatically mean you’ll have less ticks.
True: They can carry disease
What isn’t a myth, though, is that ticks can be vectors of disease. These include Rocky Mountain spotted fever, tularemia, ehrlichiosis, and most infamously, Lyme disease.
The good news is that you can decrease your chances of catching the disease from a tick bite if you remove the tick within 24 hours. But sometimes, tick bites go unnoticed, so it’s important to check yourself when you come back indoors during warm weather.
Ticks are shockingly cold-resistant, but they usually keep to themselves during the colder seasons. They still can come back out as soon as the sun starts shining—including on those randomly very hot February days.
True: A ‘dorky’ look helps prevent tick bites
If you do find a tick, don’t try to burn or suffocate it off your skin. Use a trusty pair of tweezers, grip it near the mouth parts, and pull it off. If anything gets left behind, your skin will naturally push it out with some time. If you’re not sure how long the tick has been on you, you should contact your doctor.
As for tick bite prevention, “I know it looks kind of dorky, but tucking your pants into your socks is a really good tip. Making it so that there are barriers between ticks and your skin as much as possible is extremely good as a strategy,” explains Cattle, who also teaches about tick-borne disease prevention for Cape Cod Cooperative Extension.
You can also apply a synthetic pesticide called permethrin on their clothes and insect repellant on any exposed skin.
Ticks are “very good at what they do,” he concludes, but “I think adopting just a couple habits at a time really makes a difference.”
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