Chicago Wildlife Watch Talk

Ticks & Diseases

  • WillowSkye by WillowSkye

    Would like to know some more information on the interesting topic of whether there is a direct correlation between the prevalence of deer and the deer tick with subsequent transference of tick-borne diseases to humans? Can one surmise that the more deer occur in urban areas, the more humans run the risk of inadvertently picking up these ticks and contracting tick-borne diseases if the places they frequent overlap spatially? Do you perhaps have some papers published on this topic that are available to the public on the web? Could have Googled it, but sometimes Google is a huge haystack within which it is difficult to find the needle and not just bundles of hay.
    Some off-topic chat: We have different tick species in South Africa but they still remain nasty. A while ago we had a family gathering and we took my parents' dogs for walkies in the nearby veldt. One of the dogs got a tick and it was fat with blood by the time we saw it. We normally use an age-old remedy to remove them: methylated spirits. The tick will remove its mouth of its own drunken accord without leaving behind any pieces that might cause infection. But there was none in the house. So my brother, ever the practical man (not that we women aren't practical), used my dad's expensive Christmas gift he had been saving: Bells Scotch Whiskey. Needless to say, the tick got as drunk as the lords and ladies at a garden party. But it worked! No pain, no fuss (except for dad). How do you remove ticks in the States? Hopefully not with Jack Daniels?

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  • mason_UWI by mason_UWI scientist

    There is some info that correlates deer and tick density but is a lot more complicated than that because you also have to factor in small mammal abundance, small mammals predators, and tick life stage. There are some publications about it but I can't recall them off the top of my head. I will look them up next week (right in the middle of simulating 'fictitious' wildlife communities to test out a new analysis technique)!

    The first time I got a tick on me I was driving between field sites, for a second I seriously considered crashing the work truck to get it off of me.

    We mostly just get good at picking them out, but I hear vaseline does the trick (it suffocates them).

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  • WillowSkye by WillowSkye

    Vaseline! Wish I had known about this before the opening up of the Collector's Item Bells whiskey. To my dad it was similar to removing the packaging off Star Wars Memorabilia or Rare/Special Edition Comics/Graphic Novels.

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  • DZM by DZM admin in response to WillowSkye's comment.

    You used priceless whiskey to get off a tick; that's a great story. 😃

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