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Ticks continue world conquest, slay species like Moose

#1
C C Offline
https://aeon.co/essays/how-lyme-disease-...ate-change

EXCERPT: . . . The story of the emergence of Lyme disease now, of its rise in dozens of countries around the world and of millions made sick, must be told through the lens of a modern society living in an altered environment. In the last quarter of the 20th century, a delicate array of natural forces indisputably tipped – were tipped, more accurately – to transform Lyme disease from an organism that lingered quietly in the environment for millennia to what it is today: the substance of painful stories shared between mothers; a quandary for doctors who lack good diagnostic tests and clear direction; the object of rancour over studies that discount enduring infection while acknowledging persisting pain.

The CDC does not use the word ‘epidemic’ to describe Lyme disease. It prefers the term ‘endemic’, which it defines as the ‘constant presence and/or usual prevalence of a disease or infectious agent in a population within a geographic area’. But, surely, Lyme was not always present or prevalent. Nor is it confined within well-defined borders. The CDC’s linguistic choice is unfortunate. It serves to minimise the import of a disease that yields some 300,000 to 400,000 new cases in the US each year, is found in at least 30 countries and likely many more, and is growing precipitously around the world. Lyme disease is moving, breaking out, spreading like an epidemic.

The ticks that carry Lyme disease are, like spiders, arachnids not insects. Although they cannot fly or jump, they are, for all practical purposes, climbing mountains, crossing rivers and traversing hundreds, even thousands, of miles to set up housekeeping. These feats are documented by scientists who are ingenious at finding ways to track and count ticks.

[...]

Moose like and need the cold. They become sluggish when it’s warm, failing to forage as they should, and becoming weak and vulnerable. In the warmer, shorter winters of the US Midwest and Northeast, bumper crops of winter ticks are surviving to wake up when the trees burst to life in earlier springs; they have more time in longer falls to cling in veritable swarms on the edges of high bushes, their legs outstretched, waiting for a ranging, unsuspecting, and wholly unprepared moose. When the moose lie in the snow, they leave carpets of blood from engorged ticks. When a baby moose emerges from the womb in Minnesota, a band of thirsty ticks moves from mother to neonate. The moose shed those fat, flush ticks onto fall and winter ground, and the ticks snuggle into the leaf litter rather than freeze in the snow, as they once might have, reducing tick mortality but upping that of the moose.

[...] Winter ticks have been known to afflict moose since the late-1800s. In a normal year, a single moose might carry 1,000 or even 20,000 ticks. In a particularly harsh winter, when moose are underfed and weak, anaemia and hypothermia wrought by ticks can make the difference between life and death. Bill Samuel, a biology professor now retired from the University of Alberta, has spent a career studying the moose of North America. He painstakingly counted 149,916 ticks on a moose in Alberta in 1988. In a 2004 book, he recounts episodes of ticks killing moose in Saskatchewan in the spring of 1916, in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick in the 1930s, and in Elk Island National Park in central Alberta at points from the 1940s to the ’90s. Some of the animals were so infested that there was not a tick-free spot in the arachnids’ favoured places – the anus, the inguinal area, the sternum, the withers and lower shoulders. In futile attempts to rid the parasite, these pathetic animals had rubbed against trees to seek relief, losing long, lustrous fur and leaving greyish, mottled patches. They are called ‘ghost moose’.

Moose have long died from disease, predators, hunting and sometimes ticks. But their losses in the early 21st century had a different, more threatening, more consequential implication....

MORE: https://aeon.co/essays/how-lyme-disease-...ate-change
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#2
elte Offline
There's something about the North with the swarms of ticks along with the swarms of mosquitos, parasites apparently holding their place at inflicting pain and death upon the warm-blooded.
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