TICK, TICK, TICK

 

     OK, you just spent the afternoon adding to your guess-what-bird-I-saw-today list by walking a mile though the brush along the river. It was a hot day, so you are changing out of your sweaty duds and admiring your image in a mirror when notice a new mole just below your belly button. You move a little closer to the mirror, stand on your tippytoes, and realize that the mole has a silver-brown sheen and, aw Jeez, legs. The temple of your body has been invaded by a parasite and it is dining on your vital fluids. Tick alert! Quick, get the critter off your skin, but how? 

     First, a bit of soft science. There are roughly eight hundred types of ticks on this planet. A hundred of these can carry disease to warm-blooded critters, including humans. Not every tick carries a disease. Of the hundred types, five species will be found in the Pacific Northwest. These are the Rocky Mountain Tick, the American Dog Tick, The Brown Dog Tick, the Western Black-legged Tick, and the Relapsing Fever Tick. 

     Ticks are not insects, they are arachnids, eight-legged, like spiders. They go through four stages of life…egg, larva, nymph and adult. It takes about two years for a tick to hatch from the egg, go through the other three stages, reproduce, then die. 

     Eggs hatch into six-legged larvae called seed ticks, about the size of the period at the end of this sentence. A larva finds blood, dines, drops to the ground, molts and becomes an eight-legged being without sex organs called a nymph. The nymph also finds a host and sucks blood, sometimes morphs into yet another kind of nymph, and eventually changes into the adult that ended up on your belly. Adult females are larger and more colorful than males. Females find a blood feast then mate, lay eggs and die. Males live to mate several times. 

     The tick found your temple of flesh because, like mosquitos, they gravitate toward carbon dioxide, which is given off as a waste product in mammalian sweat and respiration. Wacky arachnologists collect ticks by setting out chunks of dry ice that are pretty much solid carbon dioxide. If you have ever carried dry ice into the woods to freeze your trophy trout, you have probably come home with ticks.

     Ticks do not jump or fly, but they can crawl ten yards to a blood source. Their usual business model is to hang on brush in a state of slumber, sometimes for weeks, until the carbon dioxide sensors in their front pair of legs trigger them to hitch a ride on a warm-blooded passerby. 

     The business end of a tick consists of two pincher-type mouthparts, one on each side of a little harpoon thingy with recurved teeth on it, like on a fishhook. The harpoon is called a hypostome. The tick grabs onto your belly with its feet and pinchers long enough to force the harpoon through a couple of layers of tissue until it hits blood. An anticoagulant lubricant is secreted, the little pump mechanisms in the tick’s body are switched on and the blood is drawn through a straw-like mechanism in the hypostome. A fully gorged female tick can hold fifty times its dry weight in blood.

     Ticks do not manufacture the toxins that cause disease in humans. They are unwitting hosts to other life forms that they contracted while nymphs. It is those little life forms that hitch a ride in the anticoagulant juice and into your bod. My license as Junior Tick Scientist does not allow me to explore the complexities of how these critters can cause fevers, rashes, chills, paralysis and even death. That is for others up the pay scale. Suffice it to say that North American ticks could be carriers of Lyme Disease, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, tularemia, relapsing fever, and tick paralysis. 

     Now, back to the tick on your belly. Don’t fry it with a match or smother it with petroleum jelly. If you have blunt tweezers, find them. If you intend to use your fingers, it is probably best to cover the tick with a chunk of toilet paper or plastic wrap because some tick fluids can permeate human skin. If you didn’t catch the fevers from tick spit while it was dining on you, you could possibly absorb disease-causing bacteria through your finger skin.

     Grasp the tick as close to the skin as possible, then pull the critter steadily away from the skin. 
Remember, you are trying to pull a tiny harpoon/horseshoe rasp out of your skin. A steady, careful pull has been shown to be the best way to retrieve the hyperstome without breaking it off in your skin. Once the tick is removed, apply an antiseptic like rubbing alcohol or whiskey to the bitten area, both of which can also be used to pickle the tick, if that is the way you want to send it to the grave. My preferred method of tick disposal involves an ashtray and a cigarette lighter turned up high enough to weld. 

     Only you can prevent tick bites. Here are a few ways. Stay out of the woods, grasslands, or near any shrubbery. Avoid nudist weddings. Check your dog for ticks so it doesn’t bring them home in its fur. Wear light colored clothes so you can spot a tick before it finds your skin. Walk in the center of the trail. Use Deet, which has its own health hazards. 

     Or, if you are of the tree-hugging shade-grown persuasion, try citronella, eucalyptus, peppermint, lavender, cedar oil, canola, rosemary or pennyroyal, all of which mask the carbon dioxide your skin emits, but leave room in your pack for a fifty gallon drum of the essential oils, because they must be applied every thirty minutes to be minimally effective.