Flying Ticks: Two Words Nobody Wants To Hear
Yes, it seems the disease-carrying arachnids that are more prevalent than ever may have a secret superpower.
Have you ever come home from a hike, jog, or dog-walk only to find a tick crawling along your waistline, or worse—nestled nearly imperceptibly into your skin?
Ticks are eerily common these days. Which is weird, because growing up in southwestern Pennsylvania, the only tick I can ever remember was one pulled from the ear of a dog while camping. And we used to bushwhack, hunt, fish, camp, and generally roll around in all manner of vegetation. Heck, sometimes we slept on the ground. Outside. And we never even saw a tick.
Unfortunately, that is not the experience my kids will remember from their childhood. Each of my three have had dozens of ticks pulled off their bodies and plucked from their epidermises. (That’s the plural of “epidermis”. I googled it.) And we’ve all undergone the antibiotic rounds that prevent against Lyme disease. It’s just the way it is now.
So it’s with a sobbing-emoji-face that I tell you scientists have just discovered a new tick superpower. Apparently, the little devils can zoom across small airgaps using only the force of static electricity. And you can read all about it in one of my latest stories for National Geographic!
That’s Levitation, Holmes
Now, the good news about all of this is that ticks can’t actually fly across a backyard to find you. Ticks are arachnids, after all, and they don’t have wings. Nor do they have powerful jumping legs like grasshoppers or fleas. And this means that usually, a tick must climb up onto a piece of grass or other vegetation and wait for some unsuspecting victim to wander by.
The bad news is that before this new study, we thought a deer, dog, mouse, or human had to actually make physical contact for the tick to latch on. Lab experiments showed us otherwise, though, because with enough static electric charge, ticks were observed shooting across distances ranging from several millimeters to several centimeters.
Even wilder, some of the tests showed that static electricity was enough to make the ticks levitate off of a tile and into the air towards their target.
Scientists can’t say for sure whether the ticks can control any of this, by the way. It could just be a thing that happens, since ticks are tiny and static electricity can be shockingly (pun intended) powerful.
In fact, when I asked the lead biologist on the study, Sam England, if the same forces could hypothetically lift a human, he said, “Yeah, this definitely could happen to us, too. But the strength of the electric field that you would need to counteract gravity would need to be a lot stronger.”
So that’s kind of neat. You know, if it weren’t for the flying ticks part.
Sympathy For The Wild Things
But you know what I weirdly can’t stop thinking about? In an attempt to unravel how this all might work out in the wild, England and his coauthors modeled the electric field strength on a cow. And what they found is pretty interesting!
Basically, when you shuffle your feet across a carpet while wearing socks, you’re charging up your body with static. But your body doesn’t carry the same amount of charge everywhere. Certain parts run hotter than others. And it’s the same thing for animals.
As England explained it to me, pointy areas like legs and tails and noses naturally sport more surface voltage because of the way they are shaped. And these “hotspots of electric field” will probably be more likely to beam up a tick than the cool spots.
And all of that made me realize how tough wild animals have it.
Because you and I, using our big primate brains, can identify and try to side-step areas that might be tick-heavy. But a deer or cow that needs to eat plants for a living? Not only must they go into such areas, but they have no hands or tools to help them keep a distance from the parasites. They must literally plunge their faces into their food. Faces that, let’s remember, are hotspots of electrical field. Tick magnets, in other words.
And then, once the ticks are aboard, they also lack the tools necessary to remove them!
That’s Formication, Holmes
Do you suddenly feel like there are ticks crawling up your legs just reading this?
Yeah, sorry about that. Kinda goes with the territory of learning, studying, or writing about ticks. If the feeling persists, well, you might have a case of formication—which is what the Cleveland Clinic describes as “a symptom where you hallucinate the feeling of insects crawling in, on or underneath your skin.”
But you probably don’t have formication. Just heebie-jeebies. And they will pass.
To learn more about “flying ticks”, check out my story over at National Geographic!