Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey, you welcome to Stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick.
Speaker 1: And Robert. You know well that on this show we
Speaker 1: do our best not to demonize any inhabitant of the
Speaker 1: animal kingdom. But I've got to ask your opinion on
Speaker 1: one specific branch that is maybe maybe the most twisted
Speaker 1: branch in existence. How do you feel about ticks? Uh?
Speaker 1: Ticks are awful? Yes, Ticks. Ticks and mosquitoes are the
Speaker 1: only specific animals that I tell my five year old
Speaker 1: that it's it's okay to to hate on, to to
Speaker 1: actively kill or be killed with. I'm hoping later in
Speaker 1: this episode we can do a little guided meditation to
Speaker 1: take anybody out there who's got hatred of spiders, fear
Speaker 1: or hatred for for your little uh, for the good arachnids,
Speaker 1: and to move that over onto the only animals that
Speaker 1: really might deserve it, which are ticks. Yeah. I agree,
Speaker 1: And for instance, I look back on my own life
Speaker 1: and having like a revulsion at times too slugs garden slugs,
Speaker 1: which is completely ridiculous given that garden slugs yes, are gross,
Speaker 1: but pretty harmless. They're No, you're not gonna get hurt
Speaker 1: by a garden slug. I mean unless you you know,
Speaker 1: you're freaked out and your trip over something, etcetera, and
Speaker 1: there you know there's some sort of crazy scenario that
Speaker 1: you build up that enables the slug to kill you.
Speaker 1: For the most part, slug doesn't care about you, and
Speaker 1: it's not gonna hurt you. But but but mosquitoes, other
Speaker 1: parasites such as ticks, these are these are major threats.
Speaker 1: They are actively hunting us. They're actively trying to feed
Speaker 1: on our blood and in doing so, putting us at
Speaker 1: risk for a whole host of terrifying diseases. Now, yet again,
Speaker 1: I know we're gonna hear from some tick lovers there.
Speaker 1: Maybe you're a I doubt you're Maybe you're a tick
Speaker 1: scientist and you're saying, hey, I study these things for
Speaker 1: a living. You know you got to give them a
Speaker 1: fair shake. Okay, okay, I want to give them as
Speaker 1: fair as shake as I can. They are animals. They
Speaker 1: exist in an ecology and a web of life, like
Speaker 1: all animals. We try not to demonize anything here. I'm
Speaker 1: just saying, if you have to demonize something. If you've
Speaker 1: got that hate in your heart, the ticks are a
Speaker 1: good place to put it. Yes, now, I will definitely
Speaker 1: say that ticks are fascinating. I mean, we're doing the
Speaker 1: whole episode here about ticks and tickborn illness, so yes,
Speaker 1: it's a wonderful topic. They're fascinating organisms. Uh maybe even
Speaker 1: a perfect organism. And I'll also say that, uh that
Speaker 1: certainly we see cases where organisms like ticks and mosquitoes
Speaker 1: their their their nuisance factor can be intensified by by
Speaker 1: by what humans have done to the environment, putting things
Speaker 1: out of balance, making things, introducing the threat into new areas,
Speaker 1: and making the threat greater than it would normally be.
Speaker 1: It's like taking a normally rowdy and annoying child and
Speaker 1: giving that child a super soaker full of urine. But
Speaker 1: but I still have to come back to the fact
Speaker 1: that having grown up in in tick haunted wildernesses uh,
Speaker 1: I mean, namely Tennessee, I associate ticks and also chiggers,
Speaker 1: which are a type of MT closely related to ticks,
Speaker 1: as we'll discuss. I associate these creatures with just a
Speaker 1: dread of the outdoors. These are creatures that make going
Speaker 1: out outside and enjoying nature difficult. Yeah. I love hiking
Speaker 1: around in the woods, but whenever I mostly do it
Speaker 1: by putting ticks out of my mind. And when they
Speaker 1: come into my mind, that normally nice feeling of brushing
Speaker 1: through the leaves, of feeling them rub across your skin
Speaker 1: as you move through the trees, it turns into a
Speaker 1: creepy nightmare tickle of disease. And hey, eight yeah like it.
Speaker 1: It's really has has gotten to the point. Lucky, luckily,
Speaker 1: I have never experienced, to my knowledge, any tick or
Speaker 1: ugger born illnesses, or or mosquito born illnesses, you know,
Speaker 1: knock on wood. But I now when I drive, especially
Speaker 1: in the height of summer, when I drive, you know,
Speaker 1: on the interstate, and I'm going through a portion of
Speaker 1: say North Georgia or a portion of Tennessee, and I
Speaker 1: look out into the into the wilderness, I just think
Speaker 1: of all the parasites. I think that those those are
Speaker 1: just tick and chigger haunted woods, just waiting to eat
Speaker 1: me alive. Okay, So today we're gonna be talking about
Speaker 1: ticks in biology, ticks in history, some zoonotic diseases, some
Speaker 1: particularly interesting diseases and syndromes, that have been associated with
Speaker 1: the lone star tick recently. And then I think we're
Speaker 1: also going to end with a few practical tips on
Speaker 1: what to do to protect yourself from the tick menace.
Speaker 1: But first you had some notes about how a hatred
Speaker 1: is not a recent phenomenon, right, Oh no, Um, ticks
Speaker 1: and sugars are are worldwide creatures. Uh. Ticks and mites
Speaker 1: as well discussed there are a lot of them, They're everywhere,
Speaker 1: and annoyance hatred of them goes back quite a long ways.
Speaker 1: In fact, we have writings about ticks from first century
Speaker 1: Roman author and natural philosopher Plenty of the Elder. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he probably familiar with Plenty. He described many a strange
Speaker 1: and bizarre creature in his book The Natural History Now
Speaker 1: full of many hilarious and accuracies. Yes, many many, uh
Speaker 1: and and and some of them were pretty fabulous, right,
Speaker 1: he talked about it was sometimes it was just a
Speaker 1: weird echo of natural world creatures from a distant land.
Speaker 1: You know, they were exaggerated through second and third hand accounts.
Speaker 1: But he also talked about monstrous humanoid races like the
Speaker 1: mouthless hairy humanoid as stoney and the belly mouth to blemmyes.
Speaker 1: They were always one of my favorite. You know, they
Speaker 1: have no head, but they have a face and on
Speaker 1: their chest and a mouth where their belly is. Now,
Speaker 1: you just gotta wonder did people read that in first
Speaker 1: century Rome and say, yeah, yeah, that's true, or did
Speaker 1: they back then read that and say, I don't know
Speaker 1: about this. Well, I mean it's very similar to the
Speaker 1: sea monsters, right. I mean again, you're you're not dealing
Speaker 1: with with firsthand account. Someone like Plenty is not necessarily
Speaker 1: going out and exploring the world and taking notes. I
Speaker 1: just feel like I have a hard time modeling the
Speaker 1: appropriate level of skepticism to pretend to be someone of
Speaker 1: the ancient world. Yeah, well this would this would actually
Speaker 1: be an interesting one to to discuss the nature of
Speaker 1: exotic beasts represented in natural tones and to what extent
Speaker 1: people back home took them seriously. Now, of course, he
Speaker 1: couldn't have dreamed up anything as exotic as the real
Speaker 1: arachnids of the animal kingdom, right, that's right. And he
Speaker 1: really hated ticks. He called them quote the foulest and
Speaker 1: nastiest creatures that be And uh, I had actually looked
Speaker 1: up a passage from the Natural History and of course,
Speaker 1: bear in mind that the scientific information here is quite outdated,
Speaker 1: but the human disdain for ticks is not. He says,
Speaker 1: there is an animal also that is generated in the summer,
Speaker 1: which has its head always buried deep in the skill
Speaker 1: of a beast, and so living on its blood, swells
Speaker 1: to a large size. This is the only living creature
Speaker 1: that has no outlet for its food. Hence, when it
Speaker 1: has overgorged itself, it bursts asunder, and thus it's very
Speaker 1: element has made the cause of its death. That is great,
Speaker 1: He's saying. Picks can't poop, and they drink so much
Speaker 1: of your blood, and they're so greedy that they just
Speaker 1: explode and die. Yeah, they're like just a lesson in gluttony,
Speaker 1: which h yeah, I mean when you think of the tick,
Speaker 1: that's what you think of this thing. But it is
Speaker 1: just engaging itself on your blood or the blood of
Speaker 1: sable love pet to the point where they're just bags
Speaker 1: of blood. Well, I guess we should look at the
Speaker 1: real science of ticks, right yea, So we'll put aside
Speaker 1: we're not gonna use plenty as a primate source on this, okay,
Speaker 1: So what we'll we'll table that for now come back
Speaker 1: to whether they just drink blood until they explode because
Speaker 1: they can't poop. So ticks are what are they? They
Speaker 1: are not insects. They are arachnids in the same class
Speaker 1: as spiders and scorpions. Yeah, and as far as arachnids go,
Speaker 1: the subclass akari is where all the real arachnid diversity is.
Speaker 1: So in our previous episode on spiders, we mentioned forty
Speaker 1: five thousand species of spiders, that being the about the
Speaker 1: most recent count. But there are an estimated fifty thousand
Speaker 1: species of mites. That's another kind of arachne right closely
Speaker 1: related to ticks, and we'll get into those in a bit.
Speaker 1: And then they are upwards of nine different ticks. A
Speaker 1: good four variety of those mites, by the way, just
Speaker 1: live in house dust. They they kind of live in everything,
Speaker 1: living everywhere. And uh yeah, the ticks and mites both
Speaker 1: benefit from worldwide distribution. Wow, So if you scoop up
Speaker 1: some dust bunnies from your floor, you're likely to have
Speaker 1: some great diversity of mites in your hands. Cool. Now, Okay,
Speaker 1: ticks are of course obligate thematophagus ectoparasites of terrestrial vertebrates
Speaker 1: now that that's a mouthful, let's break it down there.
Speaker 1: Ectoparasites meaning they're parasitic organisms that work from the outside.
Speaker 1: Unlike some other things. They don't try to get inside you.
Speaker 1: They're happy to work through your skin. Their prey is
Speaker 1: terrestrial vertebrates. This means land dwelling animals with backmones like mammals, birds,
Speaker 1: and reptiles. They're obligate hematophages mean meaning that they live
Speaker 1: by drinking blood and this is their determined survival niche.
Speaker 1: So blood sucking isn't just an option for ticks. It's
Speaker 1: not one tool in their survival toolkit. It's blood or bus.
Speaker 1: This is how they have to survive. So there are
Speaker 1: two primary superfamilies of ticks. There's the hard ticks, which
Speaker 1: are exodoidea and uh, those are usually going to be
Speaker 1: larger and they've got a harder exoskeleton, the outer the
Speaker 1: outer shell. And then they're the argosoidea, which are the
Speaker 1: soft ticks. Those are usually smaller and they've got a
Speaker 1: softer body. Yeah, so the hard ticks generally we're talking
Speaker 1: three point six to twelve point seven millimeters in size.
Speaker 1: Soft ticks one point seven to six point one millimeters
Speaker 1: in size, but both varieties can reach twenty to thirty
Speaker 1: millimeters when they're fully engorged on precious blood, until they
Speaker 1: just make themselves explode as they can't poop. Well, I
Speaker 1: I guess this um. This observation comes from the fact
Speaker 1: that they do become so in gorge that they are
Speaker 1: easily popped in the fingers between the fingers if you're
Speaker 1: say pulling one off of a dog, which you don't
Speaker 1: want to do. By the way, this is something I
Speaker 1: learned when I was a kid. I saw adults taking
Speaker 1: ticks off of pets and off of people, and they
Speaker 1: would intentionally crush them between their fingernails or crush them
Speaker 1: with their fingers when they could while they were pulling
Speaker 1: them off. We'll get into the full range of tick
Speaker 1: tips later, but you don't want to do that. Ideally,
Speaker 1: you want to remove the tick without rupturing its body.
Speaker 1: Here's a question. Now we know it goes back to
Speaker 1: plenty of the elder, but how much further back does
Speaker 1: tick hate go? How long have other larger animals been
Speaker 1: hating ticks? You can, I think safely say that dinosaurs
Speaker 1: hated ticks because the fossil record indicates that ticks probably
Speaker 1: first arose in the Cretaceous period between sixty and a
Speaker 1: hundred and forty six million years ago. Well, I mean
Speaker 1: there's a lot of vertebrate diversity during this time. This
Speaker 1: was just a buffet, right, a lot of stuff to suck.
Speaker 1: So uh, I looked into the history a little bit
Speaker 1: about this. That there's a wonderful book that I've referenced
Speaker 1: on the podcast before titled Dark Banquet Blood and the
Speaker 1: Curious Lives of Blood Feeding Creatures by Bill Shoot. I
Speaker 1: highly recommend it. He has a he talks a lot
Speaker 1: about bats and a lot of and also about other
Speaker 1: blood drinking organisms. So of course he talks about ticks
Speaker 1: and he talks a little bit about their evolution. So
Speaker 1: tick ancestors were likely mights. Again I mentioned it might
Speaker 1: are very closely related to ticks, okay, and they evolved.
Speaker 1: These might evolved to become obligate to sango var's obligate
Speaker 1: blood drinkers like we've been discussing, um but but but
Speaker 1: the difference here is that might are not obligates okay, like,
Speaker 1: for instance, the modern and definitely foul jigger or red bug.
Speaker 1: The more technical term here is Trumpiculidae, which comes from
Speaker 1: the Greek to tremble. So these creatures and if you've
Speaker 1: if you've ever had to deal with these, these are
Speaker 1: are just horrific creatures to have to to to live
Speaker 1: in the same environment with. I've hated them indirectly and
Speaker 1: that they have assaulted beloved members of my family, including
Speaker 1: my wife before. But you never wanted to go out
Speaker 1: of the fields and strangle the little things myself. No,
Speaker 1: I don't think I've ever maybe when I was a kid,
Speaker 1: I don't remember ever having a big chigger attack. But
Speaker 1: they they they've gotten all up on the legs of
Speaker 1: people I have known in love. I just remember them
Speaker 1: being a huge problem when I would go to Scout
Speaker 1: camps as a kid, and uh and and they seem
Speaker 1: to just be particularly bad in areas that I continue
Speaker 1: to visit, like as some friends who live in the
Speaker 1: North Georgia Mountains they have a bad ugger problem. And
Speaker 1: then my my mom's house the area surrounding it has
Speaker 1: has quite a schigger problem as well. So the interesting
Speaker 1: thing though about these chiggers, which are mites. Again, they
Speaker 1: only feed on blood in their larval stage, so that
Speaker 1: the larval stages when they're actually feasting on your blood
Speaker 1: the rest of the time, and when they get become larger,
Speaker 1: when they reach a maturity, they're living in the ground
Speaker 1: feasting on arthropods and also arthropod eggs picks. On the
Speaker 1: other hand, Uh, what what essentially happened here is that
Speaker 1: they evolve to carry on their juvenile ways exclusively. And
Speaker 1: this is a common route we see in evolution. Actually,
Speaker 1: often the router species takes to become a new species
Speaker 1: is carrying over some juvenile characteristics into adulthood. Yeah, essentially
Speaker 1: becoming like a blood sucking Peter Pan, an eternal man
Speaker 1: baby in everything but breeding. Because that's the key thing, right,
Speaker 1: is that if you're going to remain a juvenile blood
Speaker 1: drink or your entire life, you also need to be
Speaker 1: able to reproduce as an adult. So how does that happen? Well,
Speaker 1: according to Shoot, what occurs here is quote a change
Speaker 1: in the timing of genetically programmed events, a process known
Speaker 1: as heterochroni. So it might somehow maintain its larval feeding
Speaker 1: behavior into adulthood. And and we actually have a few
Speaker 1: examples of this that we can look to in the
Speaker 1: contemporary world. The most well known process. For this is
Speaker 1: a neotony by which an organism reaches sexual maturity while
Speaker 1: otherwise juvenile, and the mud puppy salamander is an example
Speaker 1: of this. It retained its gills through adulthood instead of uh,
Speaker 1: you know, essentially leaving them behind um in it's in
Speaker 1: its juvenile stage right, so it would have otherwise had
Speaker 1: like this amphibious lifestyle cycle where it was like a
Speaker 1: guild underwater organism as a larva and then became this
Speaker 1: air breathing organism as an adult. But it maintains the
Speaker 1: gills throughout adulthood. So the examples of the tick and
Speaker 1: the chigger are interesting to look at because you see
Speaker 1: the divergence there. One continues to stick to a very
Speaker 1: successful strategy of only feeding on blood when it's small,
Speaker 1: when it's when it's young, whereas the tick just continues
Speaker 1: to do it. It was so successful, so good at it,
Speaker 1: it doesn't need to do anything else. Oh, I'm so
Speaker 1: tempted to do that thing here that biologists hate, where
Speaker 1: you imply that a an organism that's taken a further
Speaker 1: evolutionary route has somehow become more advanced. Now we know
Speaker 1: that's not the case. And I hate it when people
Speaker 1: use that metaphor, but I want to say the ticks
Speaker 1: are just more advanced micro vampires. They are. Yeah. Well,
Speaker 1: and the the the other interesting thing. I'll get into
Speaker 1: the details here in a bit, but the tick is
Speaker 1: the only one that is a true vampire. The trigger,
Speaker 1: though it is essentially feasting on your blood, it's not really,
Speaker 1: it's doing something a bit grosser to you. Now, if
Speaker 1: we want to look back at tick history itself, a
Speaker 1: lot of what we know about ancient ticks is through
Speaker 1: ticks we've found preserved in fossilized amber, Yes, fossilized amber,
Speaker 1: just like in Jurassic Park. And like in Jurassic Parks,
Speaker 1: some samples of these, amazingly have maintained some of the
Speaker 1: red blood cells, the ythrocytes of the mammals that these
Speaker 1: ticks were feeding on millions of years ago. This brings
Speaker 1: up an amusing idea. What you have Jurassic Park. All
Speaker 1: these kids, you know, they go to it in this
Speaker 1: fictional scenario, and they're excited about seeing the dinosaurs, but
Speaker 1: instead all they have are ancient mosquitoes and ticks. Just
Speaker 1: you're just riding around in in a special car and
Speaker 1: you just look out and just ancient mosquitoes flocking to
Speaker 1: the glass trying to get in, ticks kind of raining
Speaker 1: from the trees like uh like snow, like evil fruit
Speaker 1: dropping from above. Yeah, and they're they're giant ticks. I'm
Speaker 1: not saying that they're actually were giant ticks, and we
Speaker 1: can believe maybe. Yeah. I mean, if we're we're doing
Speaker 1: the Durassic Park scenario and we're we're tweaking science a
Speaker 1: bit for blockbuster success, everyone who wants to see giant ticks,
Speaker 1: welcome to a matto phage park. Yeah. So one interesting
Speaker 1: study here is in April of this professor emeritus of
Speaker 1: Oregon State University, George George Poynard, Jr. Published a paper
Speaker 1: describing a really interesting fossil find. So it was a
Speaker 1: tick of the genus Ambiloma, which is a genus that
Speaker 1: will come up later on. And it was engorged with
Speaker 1: blood preserved in a sample of dominican amber. Not only that,
Speaker 1: but there were two holes in its dorsal exoskeleton. So
Speaker 1: the back of the tick, it's engorged with blood and
Speaker 1: it's been punctured. And this indicates that the tick was
Speaker 1: probably plucked off of its host by force, so you
Speaker 1: have to imagine this ancient scene. Probably what happened is
Speaker 1: that this tick was a casualty of primate grooming. So
Speaker 1: one monkey plus a tick off of another monkey somewhere
Speaker 1: between fifteen and forty five million years ago, punctures that
Speaker 1: ticks in gorged body like you're not supposed to do,
Speaker 1: then drops it into a puddle of tree resin which
Speaker 1: hardens and then preserves it almost perfectly. And this also
Speaker 1: preserved something amazing mammalian red blood cells pouring out of
Speaker 1: the punctures in the ticks back. Even more amazing. Point
Speaker 1: claimed that because of the preservation quality, you can make
Speaker 1: out the evidence of a blood parasite known as pyroplasms
Speaker 1: that are attacking the red blood cells that the tick
Speaker 1: drank from the monkey. So at the micro scale, this
Speaker 1: is a really cool fossil action scene. Oh that is
Speaker 1: and it this brings to mind two things. The first point,
Speaker 1: I want to make it totally non scientific, but I
Speaker 1: wonder if anyone has devised a monster movie in which
Speaker 1: someone tries to clone an ancient hominid or a or
Speaker 1: an ape from blood like this, and since it's it's
Speaker 1: blood from inside the tick. You end up with a
Speaker 1: tick hominid hybrid get Roger Corman on the phone, brilliant. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it basically rights itself. But the other idea is, I
Speaker 1: wonder if we do have any tick defenders out there,
Speaker 1: if this is not an area of consideration. The role
Speaker 1: that ticks might have had in the social evolution of
Speaker 1: primate species is fecial humans. Yeah, I mean so, we
Speaker 1: spent a lot of time at the beginning of this
Speaker 1: episode dwelling on how easy it is to hate ticks
Speaker 1: that might be programmed into us at a very basic level,
Speaker 1: because it is what it may be a big part
Speaker 1: of what gives us the social functions of our brain.
Speaker 1: So if you look at grooming as one of the
Speaker 1: primary social activities of primates and our brains as being,
Speaker 1: according to the social brain hypothesis, primarily shaped by social relationships,
Speaker 1: and like remembering who you've groomed, who grooms who? Uh,
Speaker 1: the kind of power dynamics in these grooming relationships. So
Speaker 1: you've got ticks. You've got ticks right there at the
Speaker 1: center of what makes us who we are. Yeah. Hey,
Speaker 1: here's a third bonus idea for any especially for startups.
Speaker 1: I think tech startups stuff. What you do is you
Speaker 1: introduce ticks into your office environment and then encourage social
Speaker 1: grooming techniques to keep tickboard illnesses from uh, you know,
Speaker 1: be abilitating your your workforce. I am foreseeing some hr complication.
Speaker 1: All right, so let's let's move back to the tick
Speaker 1: in my scenario for a second, because I want to
Speaker 1: talk about their feeding practices. So, first of all, I
Speaker 1: mentioned how ticks and mites, especially especially chiggers, and also
Speaker 1: you could probably extend this stephen mosquitoes as well. These
Speaker 1: are creatures that are not just mere parasites that they
Speaker 1: hunt us. I feel like we often lose sight of that. Uh.
Speaker 1: Ticks and mites use a combination of light, touch and
Speaker 1: chemical stimuli to track you and then to spring and chickers,
Speaker 1: especially your speed demons. So they move in, they find
Speaker 1: the thinnest parts of your skin, such as ankles or armpits.
Speaker 1: They crawl under any type clothing they encounter, and that's
Speaker 1: often where they bite and then they and then when
Speaker 1: once they buy, they start feeding. So what is chigger
Speaker 1: feeding like? Oh, it's it's grotesque. It's you might expect
Speaker 1: it to be more in line with what a tick does.
Speaker 1: But the tick is more is really more specialized, and
Speaker 1: what the chigger is doing is more in line with
Speaker 1: Brundle fly. Ronin brings the fly um, so the chigger
Speaker 1: attaches and then basically just shives the be Jesus out
Speaker 1: of the target area, injecting their saliva into the wound.
Speaker 1: Then the outer layer of the epidermis hardens into a
Speaker 1: straw like style of stone. The saliva flows down this
Speaker 1: tube and in the enzymes melt the surrounding tissue. And
Speaker 1: this is where I want to quote quote Bill Shoot
Speaker 1: because he puts this perfectly, says the rudest part of
Speaker 1: the chiggers feeding gig begins as the liquefied dermal stew
Speaker 1: is snorked up through the style of stone and into
Speaker 1: the parasite's muscular fearings. Wow, so so it comes in
Speaker 1: stabs you up real good, like it's like it's you know,
Speaker 1: with an ice pick, breaking up some ice, and then
Speaker 1: it puts some in zymes on you or is that right?
Speaker 1: It does a little dissolving. Yeah, there's a Basically it
Speaker 1: would be like imagine a dungeon and dragon scenario where
Speaker 1: a evil goblinoid stabs you with a magical dagger that
Speaker 1: like the wound caught arizes into a tube like a
Speaker 1: grotesque infected tube, and then it uses that as a straw,
Speaker 1: right to just to pump a bunch of dissolving saliva
Speaker 1: into your body and then slop up the work snork
Speaker 1: up the dermal stew afterwards. So so it's just it's
Speaker 1: almost not fair to call it sucking because there you're
Speaker 1: imagining a tidier process. It's more like, just go into
Speaker 1: town on you, right, and while there are going to
Speaker 1: be blood cells in that that that liquefied stew, it's
Speaker 1: not drinking just blood, right, So well, to be fair
Speaker 1: in some of what I've read, now, ticks are primarily
Speaker 1: blood feeders, but they do get some other bits of
Speaker 1: you in what they consume. Now, the immune reaction to this,
Speaker 1: this awful violence against your flesh, that's what causes the
Speaker 1: insane itching with chiggers. And it's worth noting that most
Speaker 1: chiggers don't get to finish their human meals. They're gonna
Speaker 1: get brushed off before they can actually fully engorge. Now
Speaker 1: there's a whole host of so it's pointless too. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, they just cause all the suffering and they
Speaker 1: don't even really get to finish. Yeah, yeah, they that
Speaker 1: most of them don't even get to finish. Now, one
Speaker 1: of the other things about chiggers is since they're so small,
Speaker 1: so so difficult to observe, there there's a lot of
Speaker 1: misinformation about out there about what they are and what
Speaker 1: do you do about their bites. So one of the
Speaker 1: common things I encounter is there's people that believe that
Speaker 1: the chigger is still in the skin, that it crawls
Speaker 1: inside you and is down there making you itch, and
Speaker 1: that you therefore need to put like fingernail um uh
Speaker 1: polish on top of it to suffocated in your skin. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but that's complete hooeie because the the the chigger beads
Speaker 1: and then falls away. Often most of the time incompletely
Speaker 1: feeds and then falls away. So once you have that
Speaker 1: bite and you're having to contend with that bite, the
Speaker 1: chigger is gone. Um, You're just gonna have to deal
Speaker 1: with the subsequent immune reaction. Right, So, how is the
Speaker 1: tick feeding process different than the chigger process? Okay, so
Speaker 1: the tick uh is a more advanced drinker of liquids,
Speaker 1: So unlike the chigger, it has an actual blood snor
Speaker 1: cole that it uses thank god, I mean, use your
Speaker 1: own blood funnel, don't forge one out of my flesh
Speaker 1: like some sort of a jerk. So it latches onto
Speaker 1: the flesh, It scissors its way into the host skin
Speaker 1: with its uh chillisrae, which are pincer like claws, and
Speaker 1: it drives this this straw and this the this, this
Speaker 1: device that's known as a hippo stone. So this in
Speaker 1: this hippo stone terminates in hook like projections. It holds
Speaker 1: it in place, so it it essentially anchors itself and
Speaker 1: your skin with this thing. And some species of ticks
Speaker 1: have saliva that effectively clues it in place for the
Speaker 1: duration of its feeding. And then they breathe through openings
Speaker 1: in their adomen during office because you know, obviously you
Speaker 1: can't expect them to breathe through the front of their body. Terrific. Well, Robert,
Speaker 1: I think maybe we should take a quick break and
Speaker 1: when we come back, we will get back into the
Speaker 1: history of the tick or some crazy alleged facts about
Speaker 1: tick torture. All right, we're back, Okay, So I wanted
Speaker 1: to explore one morbidly fascinating but I think likely dubious
Speaker 1: historical claim. I came across, and that is the claim
Speaker 1: of Central Asian tribes using tick torture on prisoners, essentially
Speaker 1: working with the ticks, if it were true. Now I'll
Speaker 1: get to all the qualifications on that in a minute.
Speaker 1: So I first came across this in the Encyclopedia of
Speaker 1: Entomology edited by John L. Capanira, and this looks to be.
Speaker 1: This is a very solid, you know, respectable academic encyclopedia.
Speaker 1: And there is an entry on the argusids or the
Speaker 1: soft ticks by Hebrew University of Jerusalem and entomologist and
Speaker 1: parasitologist Igor Uspinsky. And in this entry he's talking about
Speaker 1: tick infestation of human and animal habitations, and he mentions
Speaker 1: that the longer ticks go without food, the more aggressively
Speaker 1: they attack those who come within range of them. And
Speaker 1: then he writes, quote, in past centuries, special bug traps
Speaker 1: full of hungry argusids were used by Central Asian rulers
Speaker 1: for the torture of prisoners who died from exanguination, which
Speaker 1: means bleeding to death by thousands of ticks. And I,
Speaker 1: obviously you can guess why that got my attention. UH.
Speaker 1: Couple of questions to follow up on. Is that possible
Speaker 1: to be ex sanguineated by ticks, to be literally bled
Speaker 1: to death by ticks? And is that historically true? So
Speaker 1: I want to start with is it possible question? I
Speaker 1: looked up some numbers and tried to do a little math.
Speaker 1: Is it possible to be blood to death by ticks?
Speaker 1: And how many ticks would it take? So there are
Speaker 1: usually four stages of recognized blood loss which indicate varying
Speaker 1: degrees of severity. You've got, you know, class one through
Speaker 1: class four hemorrhage, and the final stage, which tends to
Speaker 1: immediately proceed death without intervention, is the class four hemorrhage,
Speaker 1: which happens when the body loses about forty percent of
Speaker 1: its blood volume. Now, blood volume varies a lot with
Speaker 1: body size, but if you average us all out, just
Speaker 1: to have a typical average human adult, that that human
Speaker 1: adult is going to have on average about five leaders
Speaker 1: of blood or about ten point five pints. So to
Speaker 1: bleed to death, the average person needs to lose about
Speaker 1: of five leaders, which is two leaders of blood. That's
Speaker 1: a lot of blood to lose. So how many ticks
Speaker 1: would it take to get that amount of blood out
Speaker 1: of you? I mean this is a This is basically
Speaker 1: a death by a thousand cuts scenari area, right exactly.
Speaker 1: So I tried to look up how much blood does
Speaker 1: the average tick ingest? Again, this is going to vary
Speaker 1: a lot by tick and by host, but let's just
Speaker 1: try to get a ballpark guess. One study I found
Speaker 1: from measured the blood meal size of four different hard ticks.
Speaker 1: Now it's worth noting that Spinsky is alleging these are
Speaker 1: soft ticks they are doing the sucking. But I found
Speaker 1: this on the hard ticks. I will jump in and
Speaker 1: in remind listeners of the earlier stat that shows that generally,
Speaker 1: despite harder soft tick, uh, they can still bloat up
Speaker 1: to around the same size. It seems so the hard
Speaker 1: ticks are generally larger, but if they grow to about
Speaker 1: the same size, you'd imagine their meals to be, you know,
Speaker 1: again vastly varying across species, but having some kind of comparability. Yeah,
Speaker 1: at least for the for the factoring of of this scenario. Right, So, uh,
Speaker 1: I looked at it. So anyway, in the study, they
Speaker 1: look at four different kinds of hard ticks, and you
Speaker 1: get samples of averages like point eight one million leaders
Speaker 1: per male point fifty five milli leaders, one point five
Speaker 1: milli leaders, and point fifty one milli leaders. So I'd
Speaker 1: say on average, we can say, just for the sake
Speaker 1: of round numbers, the average tick meal is maybe like
Speaker 1: one milli leader of blood. So if you take the
Speaker 1: average tick meal is one milli leader of blood and
Speaker 1: the average person needs to lose two leaders of blood
Speaker 1: to bleed to death, you need about two thousand ticks
Speaker 1: to lead you to death. On one hand, that's a
Speaker 1: lot of ticks to have. On the other hand, that's
Speaker 1: not that many ticks I mean to kill you. So
Speaker 1: that that's my rough math. But there's still a question
Speaker 1: of could it actually happened. Maybe something maybe that just
Speaker 1: wouldn't happen in nature, like would something prevent ticks from
Speaker 1: bleeding you to death? So I looked and tried to
Speaker 1: find evidence in modern times of a human or other
Speaker 1: large mammal being bled to death by ticks. I couldn't
Speaker 1: find that. But tick infestations in the wild can reportedly
Speaker 1: have really life threatening consequences, leading not only to disease,
Speaker 1: but to like anemie and starvation in animals like moose,
Speaker 1: and can also create what's known as the ghost moose. Yes,
Speaker 1: this is a This is a grotesque example of the
Speaker 1: the the sheer, ravenous hunger of the tick. So in uh,
Speaker 1: what we're dealing with here is a cold weather tick
Speaker 1: by the name of Dermocentaur alpha pictus, and this thrives
Speaker 1: in Western Canada and it causes what's known as winter
Speaker 1: tick disease in moose and other large ungulates. So what
Speaker 1: happens is you'll have a moose that winds up heavily
Speaker 1: infested by upwards of two thousand ticks, and they become
Speaker 1: so infested by these things, so bothered by these ticks
Speaker 1: that they they're grooming themselves incessantly. They're rubbing against trees
Speaker 1: and the resulting hair loss gives them a grayish or
Speaker 1: whitish coloration. Plus they're also emaciated from the blood loss
Speaker 1: and exposure because all that time um rubbing against trees
Speaker 1: and grooming themselves as time that they can't spend feeding.
Speaker 1: So it's just pretty sad example. But I mean, unless
Speaker 1: you're unless you're rooting for the ticks, and then yeah,
Speaker 1: go ticks, because they just basically drained a moose. Well,
Speaker 1: I mean, it makes me wonder Even though I haven't
Speaker 1: found any cases where it's clear that a large animal
Speaker 1: was exanguinated by ticks bled to death, I have to
Speaker 1: imagine it may have happened at some point in history. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, I guess one of the problems when you're
Speaker 1: dealing with the natural world, of course, is that if
Speaker 1: a if a creature like a moose is sufficiently the
Speaker 1: abilitated by its tick infestation, then it's going to potentially
Speaker 1: fall to other predators, right right, So it's going to
Speaker 1: kind of take care of itself. But how do you
Speaker 1: compare that to an artificial environment where one human or
Speaker 1: one group of humans is creating a tick infestation and
Speaker 1: keeping both the individual fund from dealing with their investation
Speaker 1: and key being other animals from taking advantage of it.
Speaker 1: Can you imagine though, how disappointing that is for the
Speaker 1: predator that comes in to take the Like so pack
Speaker 1: of wolves comes up, like, hey, free moose, awesome, but
Speaker 1: it's covered in ticks. Like if somebody offered you a
Speaker 1: free steak and it's covered in ticks. Well, you know,
Speaker 1: I guess it's kind of that's one of the downsides
Speaker 1: to being a predator anyway, because pretty much any animal
Speaker 1: you're going to prey upon is going to have its parasites,
Speaker 1: and then there's a risk that those parasites are gonna
Speaker 1: flee to you. I always think back to when I
Speaker 1: was a kid. I was riding with my dad in
Speaker 1: his truck and he struck a bobcat with the truck.
Speaker 1: Oh you know, you know, pure accident. Uh. And then
Speaker 1: he got the creature and it was dead, and he
Speaker 1: put it in the bed of the truck, and you
Speaker 1: could actually see the various parasites leaving the body of
Speaker 1: the bobcat just crawling away from it, leaving it like
Speaker 1: a sinking ship. That's sad and gross at the same time,
Speaker 1: but it's you can just imagine you're a a large predator.
Speaker 1: You've killed your prey, and yeah, you get to eat
Speaker 1: it now, but also it's parasites potentially get to eat you.
Speaker 1: I'm sure they're thinking lucky us. All I'm saying is
Speaker 1: the woods are disgusting. That's that's that's but they're beautiful.
Speaker 1: And so coming back to the historical side of Ospensky's claim,
Speaker 1: it might be possible to to bleed human to death
Speaker 1: with ticks. So not exactly clear, but it would probably
Speaker 1: take at least two thousand ticks or Sospensky's claim is
Speaker 1: not footnoted. So I went digging around to try to
Speaker 1: find the earliest reference of this claim about Central Asian
Speaker 1: tick torture. In a number of English language books and
Speaker 1: magazines the nineteenth and early twentieth century, there are reports
Speaker 1: like this, so sort of retelling this rumor, especially that
Speaker 1: in the city of Bokara, which is in modern day Uzbekistan,
Speaker 1: there was a prison known as Kana Kana in which
Speaker 1: prisoners would be tortured and eventually killed by being kept
Speaker 1: in a pit infested with thousands of tips. And the
Speaker 1: earliest telling of this I found is in a Russian
Speaker 1: book called Bokara, Its Emir and its People by the
Speaker 1: Russian author Nikolai Vladimirovich Khannikov, with the English translation by
Speaker 1: Baron clement A. Debode. And so here's its claim. I
Speaker 1: want to read a quote. A corridor leads into another
Speaker 1: prison more dreadful than the first, called Kana Kana, a
Speaker 1: name which it has received from the swarms of ticks
Speaker 1: which infests the place and are reared they're on purpose
Speaker 1: to plague the wretched prisoners. I have been told that
Speaker 1: in the absence of the ladder, some pounds of raw
Speaker 1: meat are thrown in to keep the ticks alive. And
Speaker 1: then later a deep pit at least three fathoms in depth,
Speaker 1: into which the culprits are let down by ropes. Food
Speaker 1: is lowered to them in the same manner. And then
Speaker 1: the passage says that later the prisoners they have their
Speaker 1: heads shaved and they're loaded with irons and sent barefoot
Speaker 1: down to the damp pot bottom of this pit full
Speaker 1: of ticks to await their judgment in the Registeran. So
Speaker 1: this was reproduced in a review of the book in
Speaker 1: an eighteen forty four issue of the Dublin Review. And
Speaker 1: there are other nineteenth century reports along these lines, but
Speaker 1: most of them look like they're either just repeating this
Speaker 1: report or they're repeating other popular rumors about this. And
Speaker 1: with stories about these, you never know what to think.
Speaker 1: I'm kind of hesitant to believe them. One of the
Speaker 1: things is it's a report about an Asian society to
Speaker 1: a European audience in an age when you know, even
Speaker 1: widely circulated mainstream books books couldn't really be counted on
Speaker 1: for much accuracy. Uh, And We've certainly encountered our share
Speaker 1: of nineteenth century travelogs that are full of stuff that's
Speaker 1: obviously just made up to be sensational. You remember those
Speaker 1: ones about the tribes around the world who worshiped man
Speaker 1: eating trees and stuff. Uh. And also exactly the reason
Speaker 1: it's a fascinating story also makes me more skeptical of it.
Speaker 1: You know, it's sensational and lurid and memorable and exactly
Speaker 1: the kind of thing that would be tempting to invent
Speaker 1: or misrepresent for a sort of orientalist audience who's hungry
Speaker 1: for strange and gory details about far off cultures. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Plus it's it's so overly complex, right, Yeah, like they're
Speaker 1: there are a lot of like baked into the premise
Speaker 1: there there are some already excellent ways to be awful
Speaker 1: to somebody, you know, just throw them down into a pit.
Speaker 1: Like that's pretty terrible in and of itself. You don't
Speaker 1: need to add this layer of having to to breed
Speaker 1: and maintain uh this you know, enormous population of parasites. Yeah, However,
Speaker 1: I can say apparently there's nothing materially all that implausible
Speaker 1: about it from what I can tell, So I'd say
Speaker 1: It's a very creepy historical possibility, but I wouldn't put
Speaker 1: my money on it being true. However, if you're an
Speaker 1: expert on the history of Uzbekistan and you want to
Speaker 1: let us know you know one way or another whether
Speaker 1: you think this account is accurate or all based on
Speaker 1: a sliver of truth, you can write us a blow
Speaker 1: the mind at how stuff works dot Com and let
Speaker 1: us know what you think. Yeah, all right, at this point,
Speaker 1: I imagine we should take one more break. When we
Speaker 1: come back, we will get into the topic of tick
Speaker 1: born illnesses, particularly those associated with the Loan Star tick.
Speaker 1: Thank thank alright, we're back all right now. As we
Speaker 1: set at the top of this podcast, we hate to
Speaker 1: we we don't. We never want to encourage the demonization
Speaker 1: of any non human animals, and we may have been
Speaker 1: somewhat failing at that today because ticks are so easy
Speaker 1: to hate. Um. But I want to suggest one way
Speaker 1: to get something good out of tick hatred if it's unavoidable,
Speaker 1: which is, take all the arachnophobia that makes you hate
Speaker 1: spiders and and just take it off of the spiders
Speaker 1: and put it on the ticks. You can do this
Speaker 1: in your mind. You can imagine heavy cloud over a
Speaker 1: big pool full of spiders, and make that cloud away.
Speaker 1: Just drag it away from them and put it over
Speaker 1: the ticks. If it's got to go somewhere, put it
Speaker 1: on the ticks. Because spiders they're so helpful. Imagine a
Speaker 1: world without spiders. You need them to control insect populations.
Speaker 1: You'd be miserable in a world without spiders. The world
Speaker 1: without ticks, I don't know. Yeah, I mean, even the
Speaker 1: most dangerous spiders really they're they're not coming after you know,
Speaker 1: not at all. The encounter between human and spider is
Speaker 1: occurring more or less by accident. And we do know
Speaker 1: that ticks are something to actually worry about in a
Speaker 1: way that spiders are not. Ticks are a major vector
Speaker 1: of zoonotic diseases and humans and animals. In fact, a
Speaker 1: review of a scientific conference called the mid Atlantic Ticks
Speaker 1: Summit concluded that ticks are the single most significant vector
Speaker 1: of infectious disease in the United States, worse than fleas,
Speaker 1: worse than mosquitoes. If you're in the United States and
Speaker 1: you're worried about getting a disease from animals, you need
Speaker 1: to be worried about ticks. That's right. There are there.
Speaker 1: They're actually eleven key tick transmitted diseases, and this makes
Speaker 1: them second only to the mosquito in disease variety. Is
Speaker 1: that worldwide? Uh? That is that is worldwide? Yes? And uh,
Speaker 1: but but in the US alone, we have eight tick
Speaker 1: species with twelve particularly problematic species. Yeah, and tickboard illnesses.
Speaker 1: We're not going to cover all of them today. We
Speaker 1: want to mention a few of the major ones and
Speaker 1: some of the more recent interesting ones, especially a tick
Speaker 1: acquired allergy. But just to cover a few, we've got
Speaker 1: to start with lime disease, right. Yes, Uh, this is
Speaker 1: a spread by the black legged tick, and lime disease uh,
Speaker 1: in and of itself is a is a is a
Speaker 1: a complicated illness that we still don't have a a
Speaker 1: complete understanding of now. In addition to lime disease, the
Speaker 1: black lighted tick also carries a maltilaria like infection known
Speaker 1: as batasiosis and also a form of tick fever in cattle. Now,
Speaker 1: the interesting thing about lime disease, to come back to
Speaker 1: that is the white footed mouse is the primary reservoir
Speaker 1: for this, so it carries lime disease without actually seeming
Speaker 1: to suffer any ill effects. But then this spreads to
Speaker 1: ticks and then do other animals such as humans, and
Speaker 1: that's where you get the problem. Now you also have
Speaker 1: the American dog tick, also known as a wood tick,
Speaker 1: and this is the primary vector for rocky mounted spotted fever.
Speaker 1: Not something you want. And this is potentially fatal and
Speaker 1: it's caused by a particular bacterium, yeah, the Rickettsia bacteria. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Rickettsia rickettsi. I believe it's a All of these these
Speaker 1: these particular illnesses are kind of a mouthful. And then
Speaker 1: we come to I guess one of the stars of
Speaker 1: today's episode, which is the lone star tick Embloma american
Speaker 1: um Yeah, and this is so so called because of
Speaker 1: the star shaped silver marking on the females and this
Speaker 1: particular um tick you can actually catch a number of
Speaker 1: different diseases from it. So according to the University of
Speaker 1: Kentucky College of Agriculture, Food and Environment, you can you
Speaker 1: can catch the following illnesses from the lone star tick.
Speaker 1: Air lichiosis, which you can also get from a black
Speaker 1: legged tick. You can also get tulumia, this is also
Speaker 1: president in the black legged and American dog ticks, and
Speaker 1: uh tuluremia has an interesting history. By the way, it
Speaker 1: only boast an overall five percent mortality rate, but the
Speaker 1: micro organism that causes it is one of the most
Speaker 1: infectious bacteria on Earth. Soviet Union report, Union reported ten
Speaker 1: thousand cases of the illness, and then during the German
Speaker 1: siege of Stalingrad the following year, the number skyrocketed to
Speaker 1: one hundred thousand, and most of these occurred cases occurred
Speaker 1: on the German side of the conflict. This is where
Speaker 1: it gets a little bit, a little bit weird. Uh.
Speaker 1: Former Soviet bioweapons researcher Ken Alabec argue that this surge
Speaker 1: and infections was no accident, but the result of biological warfare,
Speaker 1: and Alabec would go on to allegedly help develop a
Speaker 1: strain of vaccine resistant u to Learmia for the Soviets
Speaker 1: before defecting to the United States in Yeah. So, but
Speaker 1: of course that's a whole added level of of humans
Speaker 1: taking already terrible um biological threats and then augmenting them
Speaker 1: in a way. This is the real life version of
Speaker 1: the tick torture pit. So. In addition to this, the
Speaker 1: lone star tick also carries uh that spotted fever that
Speaker 1: we mentioned um also this uh something that is called
Speaker 1: star eyes Southern tick associated ration illness, which is not
Speaker 1: very well understood now but is can easily be mistaken
Speaker 1: for lyme disease, though it's carried by a different tick. Right.
Speaker 1: The interesting thing here is that for a while we
Speaker 1: thought that that it was very similar to lime disease
Speaker 1: and it was caused by a particular spial keet which
Speaker 1: is closely related. But according to the CDC, research into
Speaker 1: this did not bear the idea out and the current
Speaker 1: cause is unknown. So we're getting into the mysterious realm
Speaker 1: of some of these tick diseases. I mean, not that
Speaker 1: they're magical or anything, but they're just they're just poorly
Speaker 1: understood and and many of them have only really come
Speaker 1: to the forefront of of research in recent years. Now,
Speaker 1: in a minute, we want to focus on this one
Speaker 1: very weird particular issue of acquired red meat allergies that
Speaker 1: may be associated with tick bites. But first let's look
Speaker 1: just a little bit more at the lone star ticket itself.
Speaker 1: Give me the back of the baseball card. Stats on
Speaker 1: the lone startick. Well, a lot of it comes down
Speaker 1: to the differences between the lone star tick and the
Speaker 1: black legged tick, which granted both are both are bad.
Speaker 1: They're bad news. Both carry pathogens that are harmful to humans.
Speaker 1: And the conflict here has been that we've seen, uh
Speaker 1: we we've seen the case of the lone star tick
Speaker 1: sweeping into the northeastern US replacing the black legged tick
Speaker 1: is the most commonly encountered species by humans. So essentially
Speaker 1: they're they're moving in on the black legged ticks turf.
Speaker 1: They're becoming they're becoming more prevalent, and therefore the the
Speaker 1: the pathogens that they carry are more prevalent, So the
Speaker 1: lone star ticks are more mobile, making it harder to
Speaker 1: create tick free zones for them with with mulch and
Speaker 1: wood ship buffers for instance. So that's another thing that
Speaker 1: the lone star ticks that have in their favor. Now
Speaker 1: I've never heard of this actually, So you can you
Speaker 1: can buffer them off of areas by by making what
Speaker 1: like moats of mulch essentially, like I understand that that
Speaker 1: that goes into some like playground in park planning. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but that's not gonna work with the lone star as much.
Speaker 1: So the difference comes down to habitat. So the black
Speaker 1: legged tick is a forest dweller, but the lone startick
Speaker 1: likes hot, dry spaces with an open spaces. So you
Speaker 1: have an interesting scenario here where global warming is one
Speaker 1: of the causes here behind this this turf war and
Speaker 1: expanding in the expanding range of the of of the
Speaker 1: of the lone star tick. But it's also because we're
Speaker 1: displacing natural forest environments that the black legged ticks tick
Speaker 1: likes with the sort of open, dry artificial environments that
Speaker 1: lone star ticks like. So be it a be a
Speaker 1: highway or you know, um, you know, a neighborhood kind
Speaker 1: of community, that's the kind of environment that a lone
Speaker 1: star tick is going to thrive in more more so
Speaker 1: than a black legged tick. And see a lot of
Speaker 1: delicious human skin. Yeah. And another factor here with the
Speaker 1: expansion of the lone startick is that lone star ticks
Speaker 1: feed on humans, coyotes, fox as other animals, but white
Speaker 1: tailed deer and wild turkeys are favored hosts. Now, I've
Speaker 1: read that the white tailed deer population and range is
Speaker 1: exploding in decades and that is uh, and that's led
Speaker 1: to some researchers to suspect that that the explosion of
Speaker 1: whitetailed deer may play in a part in the recent
Speaker 1: abundance of loan startics as well. Particularly, there was a
Speaker 1: two thousand ten Washington University St. Louis study UH led
Speaker 1: by a team of ecologist, biologists, and physicians. UH. And
Speaker 1: so yeah, you have so you have three things happening,
Speaker 1: and all of them are are the fault of human beings. Uh.
Speaker 1: Alterations in the climate, the world growing warmer, UH, the
Speaker 1: the alteration in in particular environments, changing forests into the
Speaker 1: kind of wide open spaces that that the loan startic
Speaker 1: is going to thrive. And then UH, an unbalancing of
Speaker 1: the environment that enables a prey animal like the tail
Speaker 1: deer to run rampant uh and with a few checks
Speaker 1: to its population. Don't hate the ticks, hate yourself, Well,
Speaker 1: don't hate yourself. Come on, it's not check for ticks.
Speaker 1: It's not all on humans. I mean, the ticks are
Speaker 1: pretty awful. But here we we do see a strong
Speaker 1: case being made for the destabilization of the natural world
Speaker 1: and enables uh, the villains of the of the natural
Speaker 1: world to take a more uh predominant role. All right, well,
Speaker 1: I want to hit you with a particularly odd ticks scenario.
Speaker 1: You may have heard about something like this, but if not,
Speaker 1: you're in for a ride. All right, So Robert, you're
Speaker 1: going out for a hike in the mountains of East Tennessee. Alright,
Speaker 1: I a lovely uh, A lovely place to hike. Yeah, yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: I've hiked there many times. But if you yourself at
Speaker 1: home or trying to imagine doing that, and you're like,
Speaker 1: why would I do that, Well, it's because it's where
Speaker 1: you got abducted by aliens twenty years ago, and you're
Speaker 1: trying to seek recommunion. Okay, But after you get back home,
Speaker 1: disappointed a again, you discover a parasite on your body.
Speaker 1: It's a small, reddish brown tick with a single white
Speaker 1: dot on its back, and it's swollen. It's engorged with blood.
Speaker 1: And since you've read your plenty of the Elder, you
Speaker 1: know that it's gonna pop any minute because it can't hoop.
Speaker 1: So you pluck it off, kill it, and you go
Speaker 1: on with your life. But a few weeks later, you're
Speaker 1: sitting down for a delicious cookout meal. You've got a
Speaker 1: nice cut of aged ribi, and as you eat more
Speaker 1: and more of this delicious glistening, medium rare beast flesh.
Speaker 1: You might start to feel odd, or you might not.
Speaker 1: It might it might take four to six hours before
Speaker 1: you start to feel odd. But either way, eventually you
Speaker 1: start itching all over and you develop red rashes or hives.
Speaker 1: You realize you're having an allergic reaction, and it could
Speaker 1: get worse. You could experience diarrhea, vomiting, trouble breathing, low
Speaker 1: blood pressure, and if it's a particularly severe case, it
Speaker 1: could even be life threatening. So perhaps you are not
Speaker 1: one to learn quickly, and you keep trying to eat
Speaker 1: red meat, only to discover that it happens every time.
Speaker 1: You've developed this horrible allergic reaction that kicks in every
Speaker 1: time you chow down on some red meat. So what's
Speaker 1: going on here? Well, this is a question that actually
Speaker 1: a lot of people have been asking in in recent decades,
Speaker 1: and starting I think in the nineteen nineties, people really
Speaker 1: started to notice there were these stories of acquired red
Speaker 1: meat allergy syndrome, and an allergy and immunology researcher named
Speaker 1: Thomas Platts Mills at the University of Virginia School of
Speaker 1: Medicine has been studying this phenomenon for more than a decade.
Speaker 1: And if you want to read more about this, there's
Speaker 1: actually a really good recent article and Wired that tells
Speaker 1: the story of how platts Mills and colleagues slowly unraveled
Speaker 1: the story. But to give you the simple version, Platts
Speaker 1: Mills have been hearing these reports for years that people
Speaker 1: in certain regions the country, primarily the southeast, had picked
Speaker 1: up the sudden allergy to red meat and this would
Speaker 1: cause them to break out in sweats and hives after eating.
Speaker 1: And oddly, the range of these reports almost perfectly overlapped
Speaker 1: the range of the lone star tick, the tick we
Speaker 1: were talking about a minute ago. And later he heard
Speaker 1: of similar symptoms being developed by patients who were taking
Speaker 1: a cancer treatment called satuximab, and apparently the drug was
Speaker 1: proving effective, but after taking it, people with it would
Speaker 1: have the same meat allergy symptoms in these same meat
Speaker 1: allergy regions of the country. That's kind of odd. So
Speaker 1: by teaming up with the drugs manufacturer, Platts Mills determined
Speaker 1: that the people experiencing the reaction to this cancer drug
Speaker 1: at enormous quantities of antibodies targeting a specific carbohydrate, a
Speaker 1: carbohydrate that was in the drug but that's also in
Speaker 1: red meat. Now you might be like, wait a minute,
Speaker 1: I thought meat didn't have any carbs. Well, meat doesn't
Speaker 1: have a lot of carbs, But red meat is not
Speaker 1: just protein and fat. Mammalian muscle tissues contain a sugar
Speaker 1: called galactose alpha one three galactose, known for short as
Speaker 1: alpha gal and this sugar is found in meats like beef,
Speaker 1: lamb and pork, and if you have an allergy to
Speaker 1: alpha gel, consumption of that type of meat can be
Speaker 1: a potentially life threatening risk. So after they found out
Speaker 1: about this, over the next few years, Platts, Mills and
Speaker 1: many colleagues and co authors published some papers in the
Speaker 1: Journal of Clinical Immunology started to zero in on the problem.
Speaker 1: In two thousand nine, they isolated what the meat allergy
Speaker 1: patients had in common, which is that eight of them
Speaker 1: are actually more than eight percent of them had reported
Speaker 1: being bitten by a tick. And then later in two
Speaker 1: thousand eleven, they published a paper in a Journal of
Speaker 1: Clinical Immunology showing a direct link between tick bites and
Speaker 1: the proliferation of I G E antibodies that's allergy antibodies
Speaker 1: for alpha gel for this sugar that's found found in
Speaker 1: meat and was found in that cancer drug that was
Speaker 1: causing reactions in people. So it looks pretty clear that
Speaker 1: people who get bitten by the lone Star tick are
Speaker 1: the ones who are developing these meat allergies, but we
Speaker 1: don't know why. We still don't know what's causing the
Speaker 1: tick bites to create these I G. E. Antibodies, but
Speaker 1: researchers are working on the problem. So there are lots
Speaker 1: of questions. Could it be some pathogen, is it a
Speaker 1: germ spread by the tick, or is it something in
Speaker 1: the ticks saliva that's similar to alpha gel, which triggers
Speaker 1: a sensitizing exposure in the immune system, and then later
Speaker 1: your immune system mistakes alpha gel for whatever it encountered
Speaker 1: in the ticks saliva. We don't know yet, so just
Speaker 1: to recap it could be a new pathogen to add
Speaker 1: to the established list of pathogens. It's very yeah, but
Speaker 1: it's very possibly just something bioactive in the ticks saliva
Speaker 1: because there's tons of bioactive stuff. They're essentially a complication
Speaker 1: that arises in the battle between our immune system and
Speaker 1: this the invasion of our tissue. Okay, yeah, this is
Speaker 1: a I should I should mention that I actually have
Speaker 1: a family member who who suffers from this who red meat,
Speaker 1: who suffers from the red meat allergy? Uh, caused by
Speaker 1: a lone star tick bite. Yeah, and uh, I mean
Speaker 1: it's so does this family member that they just don't
Speaker 1: eat meat anymore. They can they can still eat um
Speaker 1: like poultry and fish obviously, but but yeah, they have
Speaker 1: to they have to forego eating eating red meat, eating
Speaker 1: pork steak. Was this person a meat lover? Yes, very
Speaker 1: much so. So this isn't a certainly a scenario where
Speaker 1: since I don't I don't need a lot of red
Speaker 1: meat anymore. I have to kind of translate it into
Speaker 1: my own diet and think what I have just just
Speaker 1: because I got bit by a tick out in the woods,
Speaker 1: suddenly I could eat I could not eat anymore shrimp.
Speaker 1: You're allergic to coffee? Yeah, or coffee or you know
Speaker 1: some other element that plays an important role in my
Speaker 1: daily diet, And that that would just that would really
Speaker 1: be some garbage news, especially if it's it's the fault
Speaker 1: of this this stupid parasite that latched onto me in
Speaker 1: the woods one day. Now, I have heard accounts of
Speaker 1: people who are just like, well, you know, I've got
Speaker 1: my EpiPen. I'll just I'll just get through. Don't this
Speaker 1: can be dangerous, Like these anaphylactic reactions are are dangerous
Speaker 1: and could potentially kill you if you have a really
Speaker 1: severe one. So you shouldn't just try to say, well,
Speaker 1: I'll get through it, I'll eat the red meat. I
Speaker 1: want to deal with the hives now. I was in
Speaker 1: reading some material from the University of Kentucky about about this, uh,
Speaker 1: this redneat allergy that arises from the lone start tick bites.
Speaker 1: It did point out that the reaction can occur in
Speaker 1: people with a history of strong reactions to tick bites.
Speaker 1: This is redness and itching at a bite side to
Speaker 1: last for weeks or from many bites from a single incident.
Speaker 1: So again, there are a lot of questions and a
Speaker 1: lot of a lot of unanswered questions regarding this particular ailment.
Speaker 1: But you can, you can, you can. I think that
Speaker 1: helps to find the problem a little bit. Now. One
Speaker 1: way that this problem has gotten even weirder in recent
Speaker 1: years is that people outside the normal loan startick range
Speaker 1: have started showing up with symptoms of the alpha gel allergy.
Speaker 1: It's not exactly clear why this is uh, These people
Speaker 1: may have like picked up lone star tick bites while
Speaker 1: traveling into lone startik territory. Could be it or is
Speaker 1: it that the lone startick is expanding its range? And
Speaker 1: there are some clues, as we discussed a minute ago,
Speaker 1: that this might be the case, since we already know
Speaker 1: the loan startik has expanded its range significantly over the
Speaker 1: last two or three decades. And if it's primary prey
Speaker 1: animal is like white tailed deer and that's exploding all
Speaker 1: over the place, wouldn't be all that hard to see
Speaker 1: why the tick would be expanding. Indeed, another poorly understood
Speaker 1: stood condition I think we may have mentioned it earlier
Speaker 1: associated with the lone star tick is this starry disease,
Speaker 1: which as we said, stands for Southern tick associated rash illness.
Speaker 1: And and this just mainly manifests as like a red
Speaker 1: bulls eye rash around the side of the bite that
Speaker 1: expands to a diameter of about eight centimeters in some
Speaker 1: way similar to lyme disease, but not the same disease. Now.
Speaker 1: In in Bill Shoots a book, he he made a
Speaker 1: couple of points about this. He said that one of
Speaker 1: the plus sides. Is that's just that the star I
Speaker 1: is milder than lyme disease and the other uh, the
Speaker 1: the other plus here if you want to call it.
Speaker 1: That is, according to him, the bite of the lone
Speaker 1: star tike is more painful than many other varieties of tick,
Speaker 1: giving you perhaps a heads up on on the on
Speaker 1: the bite and the presence of the parasite, and giving
Speaker 1: you because as we'll discuss this, one of the key
Speaker 1: things with with ticks is if you have one attached
Speaker 1: your body, you want to go ahead and get it off,
Speaker 1: and you want to get it off in the correct fashion. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Now we are about to get into some practical tick
Speaker 1: tips in just a minute. But right before we do that,
Speaker 1: I wanted to quickly note the most awful tick story
Speaker 1: I've ever heard. It's even worse than the tick torture.
Speaker 1: I think, just in case you were still considering going
Speaker 1: outside this summer, Joe is going to dissuade you. Paper
Speaker 1: published in two thousand one in the Archives of Ophthalmology.
Speaker 1: I found this through an image search indirectly. Um. This
Speaker 1: paper is titled lone star tick bite of the conjunctiva.
Speaker 1: The conjunctiva. If you're not familiar. It's your eye as
Speaker 1: in conjunctive itis. Yes, so uh. They report two different
Speaker 1: cases of lone star tick bites to the eyeball in
Speaker 1: this both in the summer of two thousand the year
Speaker 1: two thousand, and both within a hundred mile radius of
Speaker 1: each other. Very odd. So, in July two thousand, a
Speaker 1: five year old girl showed up in an Arkansas hospital
Speaker 1: with a spot on the white of her eye. It
Speaker 1: was a lone Star tick sucking her eyeball. Fortunately, she
Speaker 1: was sedated and the tick was successfully removed. And then
Speaker 1: in August of two thousand, a two year old girl
Speaker 1: also showed up at a hospital within a hundred miles
Speaker 1: of the first one with a tick on her eyeball,
Speaker 1: again successfully removed. In both cases, the patient was fine.
Speaker 1: So you don't need to worry about these kids. They're
Speaker 1: they're all right. They how old would they be now?
Speaker 1: You know they're they're in their twenties. They're they're fine. Now,
Speaker 1: I mean, actually I don't know, but I assume they're fine.
Speaker 1: There's no reason to assume they're not fine. But yeah,
Speaker 1: crazy question, why so close together we're ticks? Deciding In
Speaker 1: the summer of two thousand in this region around Arkansas
Speaker 1: to start biting people's eyes or was there some kind
Speaker 1: of tick ritual going on? Are you just looking at
Speaker 1: the picture, Robert, Oh, yeah, I'm sorry, I have just
Speaker 1: we have. It's a black and white image too. It's
Speaker 1: not even the full color that's present for you on
Speaker 1: the screen. But yeah, okay, now that's the full color there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's serving. And on top of this, the case
Speaker 1: has to involve small children, which makes it even more horrific. Yeah,
Speaker 1: come on, ticks, have you no shame? Okay, well, I
Speaker 1: think we should finish up with some practical advice on
Speaker 1: how to avoid tick problems. Now, obviously this is not
Speaker 1: a medical advice show. We are not doctors. If your
Speaker 1: doctor tells you something conflicting with what we're saying, obviously
Speaker 1: trust the doctor, not us. But we're just trying to
Speaker 1: report on what major authorities, like the CDC you have
Speaker 1: to say about avoiding tick born illness. Um, So here
Speaker 1: are a few basic tick protection rules. So, first of all,
Speaker 1: never go outdoors, never go into the woodlands of of
Speaker 1: East Tennessee. You can't do that. That's true. If you're
Speaker 1: you're denying yourselves the wonders of the natural world. One
Speaker 1: thing you can do is while encountering the wonders of
Speaker 1: the natural world, you can certainly tuck your pants into
Speaker 1: your socks, wear socks, wear shoes, and uh, put on
Speaker 1: some d eat uh some bug spray with deet in it,
Speaker 1: generally on exposed skin. That stat coming to us from
Speaker 1: the University of Kentucky. Yeah, CDC recommends a minimum of
Speaker 1: solution of deet in your in your bug spray. Another
Speaker 1: thing that can help if you're out hiking around in
Speaker 1: the woods, because obviously you can't stay inside. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's beautiful out there. I love the woods. So one
Speaker 1: thing that does help is just stay on the trail,
Speaker 1: avoid walking through brush in a way that brings your
Speaker 1: body into lots of direct contact with plant matter. Now
Speaker 1: why does that work, Well, it helps in a little
Speaker 1: bit about the hunting strategy of ticks. Ticks can't fly
Speaker 1: or leap out at you like fleas or something. A
Speaker 1: hard ticks hunt for hosts with a trick called questing.
Speaker 1: Nice word, and what it means is they find a
Speaker 1: nice little spot on a piece of vegetation like a
Speaker 1: leaf or strand of grass, and they clutch that surface
Speaker 1: with their back legs and then they reach out with
Speaker 1: their front legs. And I want to add that that
Speaker 1: eggers use the same the same method resting. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: if you brush by coming into contact with this plant,
Speaker 1: matter where they're hanging out, it will grab hold of
Speaker 1: you with its front legs and hang on and then
Speaker 1: try to find a space to bite. So if you
Speaker 1: don't give them a chance to grab hold, it's much
Speaker 1: less likely that you're gonna get ticks. So does that
Speaker 1: make sense? You just don't push through the leaves, try
Speaker 1: to keep some distance between yourself and the plants. Well,
Speaker 1: I think that the way to translate this into into
Speaker 1: your encounter with the wilderness is if you're going on
Speaker 1: a hike, stay on the trail exactly. Don't go, you know,
Speaker 1: trouncing off into the into the into the waist high grass.
Speaker 1: Uh for you know, certainly to use the restroom. This
Speaker 1: is that's already bringing them mind too many horrific scenarios.
Speaker 1: Just stay on the path and hold it you get
Speaker 1: to an actual restroom, or just go on the trail.
Speaker 1: There's no shame. If someone of Jackson says, what are
Speaker 1: you doing? That's gross? You say, look there are ticks
Speaker 1: out there, triggers out there. Um, you can just look
Speaker 1: the other way while I finish. Exactly, it's all nature.
Speaker 1: Another thing. You can treat clothes with permethrin. CDC says, Uh.
Speaker 1: But let's say you've got a tick. All right, you've
Speaker 1: gone out, you realize you've got a tick. What to do?
Speaker 1: Find it and remove it as soon as possible. So
Speaker 1: it's important after you get done with a hike or
Speaker 1: being out in the woods or something, shower as soon
Speaker 1: as you get home from outdoor activity and search your body,
Speaker 1: clothes and your gear for ticks. And maybe even most importantly,
Speaker 1: if you take your pets with you, search your pets.
Speaker 1: I love my dog, but he is a tick magnet.
Speaker 1: He loves to It's it's almost as if he's directly
Speaker 1: avoiding the advice we just said a minute ago about
Speaker 1: staying in the middle of the trail because he wants
Speaker 1: to brush against all of the vegetation. It's like he's
Speaker 1: doing it on purpose. Yeah. Yeah, certainly acquaint yourself with
Speaker 1: your own body after a venture into tick land. And
Speaker 1: if you have a small child, that's so important. Uh
Speaker 1: look them over. Yeah, Like in my family, like already
Speaker 1: with my five year old. Uh. Tick check is just
Speaker 1: what you do after you've been around the woods. Yeah, Uh,
Speaker 1: not that hard to do. You just look around, make
Speaker 1: sure you don't have anything. Uh, let's say you do
Speaker 1: find one. You're back home. You've discovered a tick on
Speaker 1: your body. How to remove it? You you've probably heard
Speaker 1: a million different things. Put vasiline on it, put mayonnaise
Speaker 1: on it, kill it with fire, you know, use a
Speaker 1: use a lighter or a hot needle or something. Ceed says, C.
Speaker 1: D C says, don't bother, forget it all. Just get
Speaker 1: the thing off of you as fast as you can.
Speaker 1: And the method they recommend is tweezers. Get a pair
Speaker 1: of tweezers, and what you do is you grab the
Speaker 1: tick with tweezers as close down to the skin as
Speaker 1: you can. What you're trying to do is grab it
Speaker 1: by its head and not by its swelling abdomen, and
Speaker 1: you squeeze gently, trying not to crush it, and you
Speaker 1: pull it upward with a steady, gentle motion. And you
Speaker 1: don't twist, you don't jerk. You're trying not to break
Speaker 1: off the tick's mouth parts inside your skin. If you
Speaker 1: do break off the mouth parts inside your skin. You
Speaker 1: want to try to remove those with the tweezers as well.
Speaker 1: Then you want to clean the bite area with disinfectant
Speaker 1: like alcohol or iodine or soap and water. Once you've
Speaker 1: got a removed tick, do not crush it with your fingers,
Speaker 1: drop it in alcohol or some of their poison to
Speaker 1: safely kill it, or just drop it in the toilet
Speaker 1: and flush it down. And if you do get a
Speaker 1: tick bite and you get a rash or a fever
Speaker 1: within a few weeks of the bite, you see a
Speaker 1: doctor and tell them about it. Yes, And in the
Speaker 1: case of star I believe that can manifest it as
Speaker 1: soon as seven days. So so yeah, it's not once
Speaker 1: the tick is removed. Uh, keep an eye on how
Speaker 1: the bite area is behaving, yes, exactly, and also also
Speaker 1: keep an eye out for for general symptoms of signals.
Speaker 1: If you get headache, fever, things like that, see a doctor.
Speaker 1: Tell them you were bit by a tick, remember when
Speaker 1: you got bit. Especially if you can tell what the
Speaker 1: tick looks like, that'll help too. Yes, indeed, back if
Speaker 1: you were if you're drowning the thing in alcohol and
Speaker 1: not flushing it down the toilet, you could even hang
Speaker 1: on to the specimen. Should that become important later on, Hey,
Speaker 1: I got a shot glass full of whiskey and seventeen
Speaker 1: ticks f last summer in it. Yeah, I mean, don't
Speaker 1: get don't go crazy with it, don't start a tick collection. Um,
Speaker 1: we'll get into uncomfortable territory there, I think, pretty quickly.
Speaker 1: But making now, you could hang onto it, or I
Speaker 1: guess you could take a photo of it. That's maybe
Speaker 1: less grotesque if you have the appropriate you know, zoom
Speaker 1: on your your camera. I think the moral of today's
Speaker 1: story is that at some point in your life you
Speaker 1: will get a tick in your eyeball. Oh no, no, no,
Speaker 1: no no. I I think the argument is, don't worry
Speaker 1: about the ticks in the highball, don't worry about the
Speaker 1: the the exotic pits full of ticks, or even about
Speaker 1: the uh you know that the tick borne pathogens that
Speaker 1: have been uh that have been altered in Soviet bio
Speaker 1: weapons labs. But yeah, just the worry. Let even don't worry,
Speaker 1: but be aware of the everyday a threat posed by
Speaker 1: tickborn path Don't worry, be vigilant, safe, be vigilant. Ticks
Speaker 1: are a part of your world. Chiggers are a part
Speaker 1: of your world and just act accordingly. So there you
Speaker 1: have it, an introduction to the world of ticks and
Speaker 1: some of the mites, what you need to be aware of,
Speaker 1: what you need to to do to remain vigilant against them.
Speaker 1: I'm worried I may have gone overboard today and giving
Speaker 1: into my tick demonization feelings. So I know, I know,
Speaker 1: I know that's not what we do here. We don't
Speaker 1: demonize animals, even when they're scary. But but you've got
Speaker 1: to keep an open eye even if you don't hate them. Well,
Speaker 1: the thing is, they're coming after your blood. And it's
Speaker 1: like that scene in The Mosquito Coast where where Harrison
Speaker 1: Ford's the character kills the mosquito on the kid's neck
Speaker 1: and says, uh, says, that's that's your blood, not his,
Speaker 1: or I guess it would be hers. Right, it's a mosquito.
Speaker 1: I can't I can't remember the exact quote, but it's
Speaker 1: a valid point. Uh. Yes, you know, honor the natural world,
Speaker 1: be considerate in your dealings with other life forms. But
Speaker 1: if that life form is after your blood, you're gonna
Speaker 1: have to step to the threat. Right, that's where you
Speaker 1: draw the all right, and stay in the middle of
Speaker 1: the past. Indeed, Hey, if you want to check out
Speaker 1: more episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind, head on
Speaker 1: over to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That's
Speaker 1: where you'll find all of the podcast episodes. You'll find
Speaker 1: some videos, you'll find a blog posts on various topics,
Speaker 1: and you'll find links out to our social media accounts
Speaker 1: like Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, Instagram all of those. And hey,
Speaker 1: you can get the podcast pretty much anywhere you get
Speaker 1: podcasts these days, and wherever you get us, if there's
Speaker 1: a there's a place to leave a nice review to
Speaker 1: throw us a five star, six stars, seven stars, whatever
Speaker 1: the maximum star value. Maybe, oh, why don't you do that,
Speaker 1: because that'll that'll help the show out, and that will
Speaker 1: help that will enable us to continue to bring lots
Speaker 1: of disturbing con tent like this one, like this episode
Speaker 1: to your ear home. And if you want to get
Speaker 1: in touch with us directly, as always, you can email
Speaker 1: us at blow the Mind at how stuff works dot
Speaker 1: com for more on this and thousands of other topics.
Speaker 1: Is that how stuff works dot com