By Kelsey Grousbeck, Intern
As summer rolls along, friends and families continue to make their way to many of the Peninsula’s open spaces to hike, picnic and enjoy the outdoors. Unfortunately, the outdoors can enjoy us just as much. Summer is a peak feeding time for many species of ticks, which feed on large mammals such as deer, dogs and humans. Some ticks are harmless to humans besides a painful bite and a minor infection, but the Deer Tick (Ioxodes scapularis) and the Western Black Legged Tick (Ioxodes pacificus) can transmit Borrelia burgdorferi, the bacterium that causes Lyme Disease, to humans and pets.
Ioxodes scapularis (Deer Tick)
Lyme Disease
Lyme disease is a treatable condition, but it can cause great discomfort and serious complications if it goes undiagnosed. The symptoms of Lyme Disease vary between cases, but often include fatigue, headaches, general joint and muscle aches, muscle twitches, uncontrollable irritability and mood swings, and at least one rash on the body. The tell-tale “bulls-eye” rash often associated with Lyme Disease unfortunately only occurs in 30% of the cases, so any rash, especially one that disappears and reappears intermittently, should be looked at.
The bad news about ticks is that they feed in the nymph stage when they are about the size of a poppy seed, making them almost impossible to spot before they are on you. The good news is that they are very slow-moving and require about 24 hours of being in the host to successfully transmit the bacteria, so thoroughly checking pets and yourselves nightly can greatly reduce your risk of infection. There are many products for pets that prevent fleas, ticks and other insects from biting them, unfortunately many of these products fail to kill ticks, which often means your pets will carry ticks into your home where they can find their way onto you.
The number of cases of Lyme per 100,000 people from '93-'05.
If You are Bitten
Ticks are often found in moist, shaded environments as well as high grasses or overgrown forest areas. Once they are on their host, they try to migrate to warm, moist areas such as the head, neck or under the arms before they bite. Their bite has a numbing agent in it, so it is nearly impossible to feel when you are being bitten. If you find a tick with its head stuck in your skin, you should remove it immediately but correctly, since you do not want to press the body and inject the bacteria into your system. To properly remove a tick, firmly grasp the head as close to your skin as possible with a pair of tweezers (NOT your fingers) and carefully pull the tick out. After that, rinse the area and treat it with an antiseptic, then seek medical attention as soon as you can. If you are able, bring the tick with you so it can be tested for the bacteria or any other diseases. Since Lyme Disease has an incubation period that can range from a couple days to many months, it might not present itself immediately. To be safe, you should encourage your doctor to prescribe medication, typically Doxycycline or Amoxicillin, even if the initial test comes back negative.
Prevention
The easiest way to prevent Lyme Disease is to prepare accordingly before going outdoors. Wear long pants and a long-sleeved shirt in light colors to easily spot ticks and tuck your pants into your socks to prevent ticks and other insects from reaching your ankles. Bug Sprays containing DEET can kill and repel ticks as well, so spray your clothes before you go out. Additionally, avoid fallen logs or areas that deer might frequent because nymph ticks, the age where they feed, have been found to favor those areas. Though they can be nuisances, ticks should not be a deterrent from spending time outside. Now that you are aware of the risk, you shouldn’t have any problem hiking safely!
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Jeff Powers
Paul Ringgold
Meghan Scanlon
post4laura
In the interior Coast Ranges, ticks are most active in the spring, very rare in the summer. I lived and worked at Henry Coe State Park for almost a decade, and it was very rare to see ticks in the summer time, even in riparian areas. They seem to require a level of humidity which is absent then. We would occasionally encounter them in the winter months, but the cooler weather made them very sluggish and unresponsive. In the springtime, there are areas that you can’t walk a hundred feet without picking up several dozen, and you get used to making a point of stopping in clearings and brushing them off every few minutes before they plod their way up into a hidden spot.
Most commonly, they cling to the tips of grasses and other finely-stemmed vegetation, and hitch a ride when you brush by. They usually don’t like chaparral shrubs, but you may pick them up from grasses and deerweed that often lines trailsides through chaparral. Once you learn this, you can actually spot them several feet before you brush against the plant, enabling you to sidestep it, or, as I did when I happened to have pruning shears with me, clip off the overhanging vegetation, tick and all. There is a great advantage to hiking on fire roads during tick season, since it is easier to avoid overhanging vegetation favored by ticks.
There is some debate about whether ticks drop from trees. Some of our equestrian volunteers were sure they did, but I was very skeptical. But one day, while working the Coyote Creek entrance at Coe Park and sitting at a table under a ramada, I heard a light plopping sound. A tick was struggling on its back, and the sound I heard can only have been it bouncing off a paper sack on the table, which it could have only done if it had dropped off of the roof of the ramada.
This was not the black-legged tick, however. And our resident park ranger was very skeptical that any kind of tick would use this hunting strategy, because it seemed to require an enormous expenditure of energy for what must be a high failure rate. But a lot of invertebrates have high failure rates in their life cycles (far more mosquitoes end up as someone’s meal than ever live to draw blood, for example), the failure rate may not be so high when dropping on to a large mammal such as a deer; and in the areas they apparently do this (such as live oak woodlands), low vegetation that they might otherwise cling to may be absent, matted down, or grazed low.
One last fact to mention: Ticks in California have a much, much lower rate of Lyme disease infection than those in the northeastern US. Figures I’ve read range from 0.5-5% in California, contrasting to something more than half in the northeast. Scientists discovered the reason why: The larval stage of the ticks in California usually feed on small vertebrates, and it turns out that fence lizards and alligator lizards in California have a substance in their blood which kills the Lyme-causing spirochete. Ticks go through several larval stages before adulthood, and the older the tick, the less likely it is to be infected, because it was more likely to have fed on a blood-cleansing lizard!