Where passion for animals, science, and medicine lives…
Tick sex is gross but other aspects are more disturbing As I studied the respiration of ticks, I found the process uncomfortable. At first, I couldn’t figure out why I felt my lips purse, noticed some tension in my back, and found my focus returning to the cheap faux-leather of my armrest. I wanted distance, […]
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Ticks might be one of the original and best scuba divers I got my scuba diving certificate roughly around the same time as my driver’s license. Most days, I would rather commute by scuba than driving but that rarely works out for me. The French explorer Jacques Cousteau loved the ocean far more than I […]
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Pliny the Elder’s beliefs on ticks Since people have looked out at their natural world, they have sought to classify and understand all life, including ticks. Pliny the Elder wrote the first natural history text around 79 AD. He noticed ticks preferred some species of mammal over others. Pliny witnessed ticks feed, massively expand, release […]
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First described in Missouri in 1970, Cytauxzoon felis is a tick-transmitted protozoan within the family Theileriidae. Bobcats and recovered domestic cats act as reservoir hosts for Amblyomma americanum (Lone Star tick). As with other vector-borne diseases, a tick ingests the parasite from an infected host and transmits it to a naive host at the next […]
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