Tick hunting: The prey are tiny, the bait is human
FAYETTEVILLE, N.Y. — Before he goes out to hunt, Brian Leydet pulls on his hiking boots and his all-white jumpsuit, fetches a homemade flannel flag out of his car and then, most importantly, duct-tapes his socks to his pant legs.
Then he heads into the undergrowth, dragging his flag around like a morose matador.
He has no lure, but needs none: Leydet’s quarry is quick to attach to the white flannel, as the ticks use the tiny hooks on their legs to grab hold as they seek their own prey — a warmblooded host on which to feed.
“I am literally the bait,” he said.
He found a female blacklegged tick almost immediately. Leydet allowed it to crawl across his hand, with a sense of appreciation for his prey.
“They are the neatest little creatures,” Leydet, an assistant professor of epidemiology and disease ecology at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse, New York, said. “I could do this all day.”
Leydet is a tick hunter, and his targets are the creepy, eightlegged arachnids that have fast become one of summer’s biggest bummers. Aided by climate change and other environmental factors, ticks have in recent years steadily expanded their turf in New York and nationally, including in the Northeast, which has long been a hot zone.
And more ticks mean more cases of tick-borne illnesses. Although the gathering of ticks and data about them has been hampered by the pandemic, experts say a dozen or more distinct species have now been found in New York. Those include newcomers like the Asian long-horned tick, an interloper that has a nifty reproductive trick — parthenogenesis, whereby females can reproduce without mating with males — and the horrifying habit of attacking en masse, sometimes bleeding cattle to death.
Clinicians and researchers are also warily watching an expanding caseload for two tick-related conditions — anaplasmosis and babesiosis — including in northern and central New York, where such diseases were once almost unknown. Antibiotics and other drugs are effective in most cases, if caught early enough. But both can cause serious illness, even death.
Researchers have also found more ticks carrying a bacteria, borrelia miyamotoi, which can cause a disease that resembles tick-borne relapsing fever, linked to backwoods, parasite-infested cabins.
Also on the rise, although still exceedingly rare, is the fearsome Powassan virus, which can cause encephalitis, meningitis and other serious conditions; with no vaccine or treatment, roughly 10% of patients who become symptomatic die. In April, a Maine resident died of Powassan, one of a handful of such deaths nationwide over the past decade; Connecticut also recently reported the death of a woman in her 90s who was admitted to the hospital in early May with “fever, altered mental status, headache, chills, rigors, chest pain and nausea” and died about two weeks later.
All of which has made the work of tick hunters like Leydet more urgent, with teams of state officials, scientists and volunteers heading out to locations where ticks thrive: meadows and high grass, the edges of forests and trails, and even some parts of suburbia.
They aren’t hard to find: Leydet says he might find dozens on an hourlong sweep near his home and workplace, ranging from tiny larvae to pea-sized adults.
“They’re literally crawling in everybody’s backyard,” said Leydet, noting that once ticks establish in an area, they are “almost impossible to get rid of.”
On a recent safari, Leydet chose a ragged bit of forest in suburban Fayetteville, New York, east of Syracuse, to search and capture, using two plastic vials, one for each sex. (Females and males have to be separated to prevent mating, and death-by-mating, as males typically die after such frolics.)
About one-third of mature ticks carry some sort of disease, or more in some areas. The most famous and common disease remains Lyme disease, which was first identified in Connecticut in the 1970s.
Lesser-known ailments have also continued to spread north and west across New York into colder and more elevated terrain.
Lee Ann Sporn, a professor of biology at Paul Smith’s College, located in Adirondack Park, says the tick population has boomed in the mountains, with the ticks being found in new areas and higher altitudes.
Sporn, who works with the State Department of Health on collection efforts, said that before 2014, surveillance efforts found “very sparse” populations in the park, but that since then “the densities have increased so dramatically.”
That includes in her backyard, where her son recently had three ticks found on him. “It really freaked me out,” she said.
Such trends are borne out by data collected by Dr. Saravanan Thangamani, a professor of microbiology and immunology at the SUNY Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, who runs a statewide tick surveillance program, which invites citizens to send in dead ticks for analysis (although he said many that he receives are still alive).
Thangamani, who has been studying ticks for more than 20 years, says he remains astounded by the tick’s ability to evade a mammal’s immune system. “It’s such a small organism, but it’s amazing how many diseases it transmits,” he said. “I’m awed by the complexity.”
His website — nyticks.org — shows that no county in New York is spared from ticks, even New York City, where they have been found in every borough, including on Staten Island where newcomers like the Gulf Coast tick — a southern discomfort that is known to carry a form of spotted fever — have been sighted.
Experts also have seen more of the Lone Star tick, an aggressive biter whose telltale feature is a single-dot on the back of its females. It has been linked to pathogens like Bourbon virus and heartland virus, neither of
which are as pleasant as their names imply.
For doctors in upstate areas, the lack of awareness of some of the newer illnesses may be hindering some diagnoses, said Kristopher Paolino, an infectious disease clinician at Upstate University Hospital in Syracuse, noting that the symptoms of anaplasmosis — including fever, nausea and muscle aches — mirror some of those of Lyme disease.
One difference, however, is that bites from ticks infected with Lyme usually result in a telltale rash, often shaped like a bull’seye; bites from ticks infected with anaplasmosis do not.
“A lot of people aren’t thinking about this,” said Paolino, who notes that the disease can be mistaken for a “summer flu” or even COVID-19.
Researchers like Richard Ostfeld, a disease ecologist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, New York, say climate change is also likely making tick life easier, shortening the harsh Northeastern winters.
“They are wimpy little creatures: They don’t crawl very far or very fast, they don’t fly, they don’t hop,” he said. “And if we make springs earlier, and winters later, then we’re giving them the gift of time.”