It's that time of the year. Excellent article with more than you probably want to know about ticks. Slate.com is a great daily site. Check out Dear Prudence on Thursdays.
A Tick's Life
The first in a series on revolting creatures.
The tick's life is simple, fairly boring, but urgent. No host, no blood meal, and the tick dies. There's only one blood meal for each of the three stages of a tick's life—larva, nymph, and adult. At each stage, every one of the tick's behaviors has been honed by evolution to sense a victim and latch on.... Male and female engage in an impressive combination of gourmandise and lust. Maybe not lust exactly; for the female, it's more like being interrupted at breakfast by the UPS guy, with a package of perishables....." When does the male die?" I asked Durland Fish, who studies tick-borne pathogens at the Yale University School of Public Health. "When he runs out of energy or sperm, whatever comes first," Dr. Fish replied..... And the tick's place in the great web of life? "They transmit disease. They control population."
Next installment: Vultures!
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2 comments:
Well, that's just plain CREEPY!!!
I personnaly prefer cats, dolphins, birds or any kind of wild life that's actually pretty to look at but I know we can always count on you Billy for off the wall info... LOL... Keep us laughing!
~ Vickie ~
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