In an account published in December in the Journal of Medical Entomology, Julian Shepherd, Ph.D., associate professor of biology at Binghamton University, reports keeping a group of Argas brumpti, a species of African soft tick, alive in a lab decades, with the longest individuals living for 27 years. But wait, there’s more: At one point the ticks went eight years without feeding and still survived. Females produced offspring long after the males in the group died, and some of second generation of the ticks are still alive after 26 years. (Photo by Jonathan Cohen, Binghamton University)