Study: Predators help control ticks, stop lyme disease
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Eckert: Ticks make you nervous? You need more coyotes
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(Photo: Goldfinch4ever, Getty Images/iStockphoto)
Yes, I find myself checking for ticks more often this year. And I’m finding more, too.
My wife swears I’m not afraid of anything. “You ride your bike in the street,” she tells me.
Ticks, though, give me the heebie-jeebies. Dodging pickups on Pine Grove Avenue is no big deal; finding a tick gives me chills.
American researchers are saying we are seeing more ticks more often in more places because of changes in climate and weather. In Michigan, we used to see ticks for a month or so centered around May. This year, I picked up my first one in April and the most recent a couple of weeks ago.
Milder winters are starting them up early and wetter springs and summers are leaving them in the tall grass and brush longer than in previous years.
More ticks, then, means greater risk of a host of tick-borne diseases, including the Lyme disease that is spreading through the west side of the Lower Peninsula.
But a Dutch researcher has found another factor that may be in play.
Tim R. Hofmeester, at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, apparently has a better tolerance for ticks than I do. Even after taking all the standard precautions, he had to remove more than 100 ticks from his body while doing his research.
What he did was mice, ticks and predators in different parts of the Dutch countryside. Lyme disease gets to humans from ticks who have fed on infected mice. Hofmeester’s theory was that areas with high numbers of foxes and martens, a predator in the weasel family, would have fewer mice and fewer infected ticks.
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He did more than count animals and collect thousands of mice and ticks. He set up dozens of cameras to record their behavior.
Between the cameras and his own arithmetic, Hofmeester learned his original theory was wrong. Predators do have a huge impact on the number of infected ticks, but not the way he supposed.
Foxes and martens do suppress mouse numbers, but not as much as they prevent infected ticks. The predators kill and eat some of the mice and make the survivors jumpy.
Nervous mice tend to stay home. Mice that stay home don’t run into ticks, don’t provide food for the next generation of ticks and don’t become infected with Lyme disease. Areas with the most predator activity had almost the same number of mice as areas without predators, but had one-fifth as many ticks and one-eighth as many infected ticks.
“This is the first paper to empirically show that predators are good for your health with respect to tick-borne pathogens,” Taal Levi, an ecologist at Oregon State University who was not involved in the study, told the New York Times.
Levi points out that nothing else — culling deer, killing mice, spraying pesticides — has had an effect on tick numbers or tick-borne diseases that comes even close to Hofmeester’s findings.
This is going to be another reason I always root for the predators.
And why I’ll be happy the next time I find coyote tracks or hear a fox yipping in my neighborhood.
Contact Michael Eckert at meckert@gannett.com, (810) 989-6264, on Facebook @michaeleckert or on Twitter @michaeleckert.
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"It is the first responsibility of every citizen to question authority." - Benjamin Franklin
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