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posted by chromas on Thursday August 09 2018, @03:41PM   Printer-friendly
from the tick-talk dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

A vicious species of tick originating from Eastern Asia has invaded the US and is rapidly sweeping the Eastern Seaboard, state and federal officials warn.

The tick, the Asian longhorned tick (or Haemaphysalis longicornis), has the potential to transmit an assortment of nasty diseases to humans, including an emerging virus that kills up to 30 percent of victims. So far, the tick hasn't been found carrying any diseases in the US. It currently poses the largest threat to livestock, pets, and wild animals; the ticks can attack en masse and drain young animals of blood so quickly that they die—an execution method called exsanguination.

Key to the tick's explosive spread and bloody blitzes is that its invasive populations tend to reproduce asexually, that is, without mating. Females drop up to 2,000 eggs over the course of two or three weeks, quickly giving rise to a ravenous army of clones. In one US population studied so far, experts encountered a massive swarm of the ticks in a single paddock, totaling well into the thousands. They speculated that the population might have a ratio of about one male to 400 females.

Yesterday, August 7, Maryland became the eighth state to report the presence of the tick. It followed a similar announcement last Friday, August 3, from Pennsylvania. Other affected states include New York, Arkansas, North Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia.

-- submitted from IRC


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by ikanreed on Thursday August 09 2018, @04:31PM (2 children)

    by ikanreed (3164) Subscriber Badge on Thursday August 09 2018, @04:31PM (#719449) Journal

    You joke, but I'm way more worried about lyme disease and rocky mountain spotted fever than I am about not noticing a tick before I literally exsanguinate.

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  • (Score: 2) by legont on Friday August 10 2018, @01:16AM

    by legont (4179) on Friday August 10 2018, @01:16AM (#719718)

    This tick spreads encephalitis. We shall hope to never find out how it feels.

    --
    "Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
  • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Friday August 10 2018, @08:55AM

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Friday August 10 2018, @08:55AM (#719842) Journal

    You joke, but I'm way more worried about lyme disease and rocky mountain spotted fever than I am about not noticing a tick before I literally exsanguinate.

    It's not one tick, it's thousands attacking at the same time. And yes, you'd almost certainly notice them. But I'm not sure that makes it any better.

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.