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
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 09 2018, @11:06PM
No I'm not joking. Ticks have many natural preditors. Un/fortunately most of those preditors are quite tasty. Which is why there are so many ticks, and so few wild Turkeys and Bob White Quail.
Turkeys and Bob White eat ticks. Guinea Fowl LOVE to eat ticks. But Turkeys can be (and have recently been) restored to many areas of the eastern seaboard and will create sustainable wild coveys. Many of these states have abundant parklands, that can support Turkeys, but currently don't have any. So their folks need to ask their states: "Why aren't you restoring birds to curb the tick problem?"