Argas brumpti is a soft tick native to the more arid parts of eastern and southern Africa, and adult females (shown here) can grow up to 20 millimeters (0.75 inches) long. In their native range these ticks tend to hang out in places where they are likely to find food: burrows where animals sleep, dust baths, or termite mounds where animals come to scratch themselves. Little research has been done on A. brumpti, perhaps because it causes no known diseases, but a group maintained in a lab at Binghamton University for as long as 27 years provide impressive evidence of their potential longevity. (Illustration from African Ixodoidea, Volume I: Ticks of the Sudan, by Harry Hoogstraal, 1956, public domain)