You don’t need to touch a tick for it to find you, a new study suggests. The blood-sucking parasites may be able to catapult themselves from vegetation to their hosts thanks to static electricity.
“We know that static electric charges naturally accumulate on many animals, but how the forces generated by these electric charges influence the ecology of said animals has barely been studied,” says Sam England, a biologist at the University of Bristol in England.
Ticks are fiendish parasites that feast on blood of vertebrates and are notorious for spreading Lyme disease, Rocky Mountain spotted fever and other potentially debilitating diseases (SN: 8/9/17; SN: 11/15/18).
To see if ticks respond to the natural electric fields emanating from their potential hosts, England and his colleagues started with dried rabbit feet and acrylic surfaces charged by rubbing rabbit fur on them. Live castor bean tick nymphs (Ixodes ricinus) held anywhere from a few millimeters to a few centimeters away were readily yanked through the air to these surfaces, showing that electrical forces could carry the ticks across distances several times longer than they are.
2023-06-30 10:00:00
Link from www.sciencenews.org