The latest news about entomology, brought to you by the Entomological Society of America
By Leslie Mertz If you have ever found a deer tick crawling on your shirt or sock, you know how difficult they can be to spot. Adult females are about the size of a small freckle and nearly as flat (at least until they begin feeding and plumping up on your blood), and immature ticks—the […]
The winter of 2011-2012 was a mild one in the New York City area, and the following summer saw the lowest population density of nymphal blacklegged ticks (Ixodes scapularis) in the region since the Vector Ecology Laboratory at Fordham University had begun measuring it in 1987. And the ticks that were collected did not survive […]
An emerging tool in the fight against tick-borne disease, host-targeted bait boxes employ a sneaky trick: turning some of ticks’ favorite carriers —small mammals like mice and chipmunks —against them. And a new study in Journal of Medical Entomology shows an improved design has made such bait boxes an increasingly viable addition to integrated tick […]
By Josh Lancette Lyme disease has been spreading across the United States over the past several decades, and a new study has confirmed that ticks carrying the disease are present in eastern national parks. According to the study published in the Journal of Medical Entomology, researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and […]
An international team of scientists led by Purdue University has sequenced the genome of the tick that transmits Lyme disease, the most common vector-borne illness in North America. Ixodes scapularis, known as the blacklegged tick or the deer tick, is the first tick species to have its genome sequenced. The decade-long project, involving 93 authors […]
