It's Tick Time!
Well, once again, it's Tick Time. They hang out on tall objects (mostly dead weed stems and the sides of buildings) with their little front legs outstreched, and grab on when someone brushes past unsuspectingly. They don't bite right away, so we usually find them when they are still crawling around looking for a place to latch on (at this time of year, every little tickle and itch becomes suspect). The ones we have around here are good old Dermacentor variabilis, which some people call a "dog tick" and others call a "wood tick", while just about everybody calls it an "eeewwww" when they find it crawling up their leg.
Tick (male)
Tick (underside)
You can actually tell the males from the females pretty easily. The males have a hard, patterned body, while the females have a sort of "shield" structure behind the head, and the abdomen is unpatterned and kind of leathery.
Female tick
The reason for the difference is pretty obvious: the females have to have a strechy enough abdomen to do this:
Female tick, *partly* engorged
This one was on the dog, by the way. It could have gotten a lot bigger, this one was picked off before it was finished. They normally don't stay on a human long enough to get this much blood. Sometimes, the ones on the dogs get to be as big as grapes[1]. I can see where a small mammal, like a squirrel, getting more than a couple of female ticks could easily start having problems with blood loss.
With the amount of blood that they get, I can see where a successful female tick could probably lay a few thousand eggs without much difficulty. Even if we managed to get them all eradicated from the yard somehow, it would probably only take one passing deer to drop an engorged tick to completely restock them for the next spring.
[1] One year, we had a stray dog that S. picked up in the woods that was covered with ticks. He had hundreds, dripping off him like bunches of grapes. We doused him with medicated shampoo and kept him in the back of the truck until they all dropped off and died. It was pretty appalling.
Tick (male)
Tick (underside)
You can actually tell the males from the females pretty easily. The males have a hard, patterned body, while the females have a sort of "shield" structure behind the head, and the abdomen is unpatterned and kind of leathery.
Female tick
The reason for the difference is pretty obvious: the females have to have a strechy enough abdomen to do this:
Female tick, *partly* engorged
This one was on the dog, by the way. It could have gotten a lot bigger, this one was picked off before it was finished. They normally don't stay on a human long enough to get this much blood. Sometimes, the ones on the dogs get to be as big as grapes[1]. I can see where a small mammal, like a squirrel, getting more than a couple of female ticks could easily start having problems with blood loss.
With the amount of blood that they get, I can see where a successful female tick could probably lay a few thousand eggs without much difficulty. Even if we managed to get them all eradicated from the yard somehow, it would probably only take one passing deer to drop an engorged tick to completely restock them for the next spring.
[1] One year, we had a stray dog that S. picked up in the woods that was covered with ticks. He had hundreds, dripping off him like bunches of grapes. We doused him with medicated shampoo and kept him in the back of the truck until they all dropped off and died. It was pretty appalling.