Jamie Longo Blog 2 Suffolk County Vector Control: Ticks

Hello again! For this blog, I will focus on the role I've played in our tick control and surveillance program and explain the different aspects of it I've learned about. At first, I was very scared of the tick work thinking they'd crawl to my blind spots and bite me all over. Thankfully, with our safety procedures and permethrin-coated PPE (personal protective equipment), any ticks that do manage to latch on die before they can even make a failed attempt to pierce the fabric. They're also funnily really slow so now I'm almost not scared at all when they're close to or touching my hands while sampling because they never manage to get close to success. I feel you actually have to be more mindful of broken glass and navigating thorny patches in the woods, but I won't look a gift horse (flat solid ground) in the mouth.

As opposed to mosquito sampling, tick sampling is more of an organized team effort. We walk into the woods to the sites with corduroy flags, lint rollers, and data sheets of different grids. The grids are mapped out with stakes and transects are randomly chosen every time to get the most complete scan of the area, which we use to guide our drags. This process is relatively quick, it’s finding every larva nymph, and adult tick on the flag that makes it much longer. You need to check every spec at least twice because of how small and similar the ticks can be, especially the larva. 

After collecting all the ticks on all our lint roller sheets and labeling them accordingly, we do a check of ourselves for any ticks that might’ve grabbed on, and then go back to the office where we change and put all our clothes through a dryer cycle to ensure any ticks we missed are dead. Our methodology is structured to follow the logic of the Swiss cheese model. If you put one slice of swiss cheese on an open book, certain phrases will be exposed. No slice is infallible. To prevent single-point failures such as this, you layer multiple slices to have them compensate for each other's weak spots. Truly felt the safest once I really got to go through the procedure and see how it works. 

On the other side of things is us recording the data in the lab. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to personify the ticks in the way I could with the mosquitoes because they really don't have any kind of face-like feature, but I’ve still been able to find the cuteness within. We take down the counts one lint sheet at a time using the microscope and if need be a pen to keep track of who's been counted. I usually do borders with groups of 10 yet even then sometimes I need to make groups of 20 of those with a pink highlighter to get the total. I'm pretty sure I’ve counted at least a few thousand ticks this summer. When I first got here and saw my superiors IDing ticks at a glance and feared I couldn't get even close, but they taught me well and it's a lot easier than I expected now that I know the differentiating features!

Usually, the ticks have already died when we count them, but if we go to the lab within a few days of sampling sometimes they’ll be moving around as much as they can. It's been fun to witness them attempting to quest whenever my fingers are close because it just looks like they're waving their legs around at a concert or asking to be picked up. The younger they are the more transparent they are and it took a little bit for me to discover some of the patterns on their backs are actually the leftover blood meals in their system. When you press down on them the pattern disperses like a lava lamp, and sometimes it makes their legs kick out which I find amusingly cartoonish. 

One of my boss's fortes is the ticks and I’ve learned a lot about the environment through the lens of ticks as well. I learned about some deer vs mouse controversy in the tick surveying community as well, I love discovering niche science debates because you never know what to expect. Back when settlers first got here, they cleared out the forests and hunted all the major apex predators like wolves, cougars, and bears until they were completely wiped out from the area. At the time, they actually knocked back the deer population too, but as the decades passed, they reversed the numbers and multiplied in an unchecked space. This is where that deer versus mouse controversy comes into play for our surveillance work, because adult ticks rely heavily on those booming deer populations to mate and get the blood meals they need to lay eggs. Meanwhile, the younger larvae and nymphs often feed on white-footed mice, whose populations also surged because smaller predators like foxes and hawks declined. Toss in the fact that our recent winters have been getting milder, meaning fewer of them naturally die off in the freezing cold, and you get the perfect storm for a tick population boom. In speaking about it all I realized how little the general public even think about the actual state and health of the habitats we’re surrounded by. Most people including myself had chopped things up to if there is a plethora of life in an area wether that be the greenery or the fauna we think it's a positive thing. I love that this internship has continued to open my eyes and provide new perspectives, and I will definitely be talking about it for a long time!