NEW YORK — Hungry ticks have some slick methods. They can zoom in the course of the air the use of static electrical energy to latch onto other people, pets and different animals, new analysis presentations.
Humans and animals naturally pick out up static fees as they move about their days. And the ones fees are sufficient to give ticks a spice up to their subsequent blood meal, in accordance to a find out about revealed Friday within the magazine Current Biology.
While the space is tiny, “it’s the equivalent of us jumping three or four flights of stairs in one go,” mentioned find out about writer Sam England, an ecologist now at Berlin’s Natural History Museum.
Ticks are “ambush predators,” defined Stephen Rich, a public well being entomologist on the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
They can’t bounce or fly onto their hosts, he mentioned. Instead, they hang around on a department or a blade of grass with their legs outstretched — a conduct referred to as “questing” — and look forward to other people or animals to move by way of so that they can grasp on and chew.
It gave the impression that ticks had been restricted to how a long way they may stretch on their “tippy toes,” England mentioned. But now, scientists are studying that static fees would possibly lend a hand amplify their succeed in.
“They can now in fact finally end up latching onto hosts that don’t make direct touch with them,” he said.
The researchers looked at a species of tick called the castor bean tick, which is common across Europe. This bloodsucker and its cousins are major culprits in spreading diseases to animals and humans, including Lyme disease, and are most active in warm months.
Researchers found that when they charged up electrodes and placed them near young ticks, the creatures would whiz through the air to land on those electrodes.
A normal level of static — the charge that fur, feathers, scales or clothes pick up with movement — could pull the critters across gaps of a fraction of an inch (a few millimeters or centimeters), according to the study. While those distances may seem small to us, for a tiny tick, they represent a big leap, England said.
In the future, there might be ways developed to reduce that static, experts said. But for now, Rich said people should keep using classic tick prevention measures, including repellents, to keep themselves safe from bites.
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