A carpet python from Coolangatta that was fished out of a backyard swimming pool on January 9th by a professional snake catcher was a Lovecraftian horror. According to this article:
A snake that was recently captured near a suburban home in Queensland, Australia, was covered with hundreds upon hundreds of ticks. So many of the bloodsucking parasites clung to the snake that the unfortunate reptile looked like it was wearing a second coat of living scales.
Currumbin Wildlife Hospital Foundation in Queensland reported that 511 ticks in total were removed from the python.
Facebook page here
Nightmare inducing images here and here.
A similar nightmare inducing polyticks infestation here
An extreme infestation such as this likely happened because the snake was already sick, likely with a compromised immune system, Emily Taylor, a professor of biological sciences at California Polytechnic State University, told Live Science. When a tick bites an animal and injects anticoagulants from its saliva, the animal sets off an immune response that can kill the tick or slow down its feeding. However, if an animal's immune response is dampened, "you may see a greater number of ticks feeding or concluding their feeding," Taylor said.
Rebecca Trout Fryxell, an assistant professor in the Department of Entomology and Plant Pathology at the University of Tennessee Institute of Agriculture adds
sated female ticks can lay thousands of eggs. If the eggs are fertilized, this can blanket the host with more hungry mouths to feed.
Robots are always the answer.
Although now tick free, Nike, as the python has been named, is still suffering from anemia and "a nasty infection" but it is intended to return him to the wild once he fully recovers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 16 2019, @03:32PM (3 children)
> Damn, just throw the whole thing into a hot, hot fire.
No effect. (Southern Australia is expecting 45-47C temperatures today..)
The method for removing Aussie ticks that I was taught was to eye-drop overproof alcohol onto the embedded head of the tick, and then tweeze it off when it lifts it head out for more..
(Score: 3, Informative) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Wednesday January 16 2019, @06:01PM (2 children)
Nope.
Not sure if this was attempting to be humorous because people actually have thought that using alcohol is a good method for removal. Any irritants but just scraping the tick off is liable to cause the tick to disgorge part of its stomach contents, causing a higher chance of infection. While this might occur anyway and you might be infected anyway, straight removal is the way to go [cdc.gov]. (Though I have to admit I like using a notched credit card instead of forceps or tweezers for people).
This sig for rent.
(Score: 3, Funny) by fyngyrz on Wednesday January 16 2019, @09:20PM (1 child)
Well, for my own preferences in this, I prefer to use a shovel for people. You can both dispatch them and bury them with it, plus lean on it when you need to rest. All in all, a lovely, multi-purpose tool: low maintenance, effective, relatively inexpensive, so far no infringement on keeping or carrying, and as a bonus, it never needs reloading.
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Anything you say will be misquoted and used against you.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Wednesday January 16 2019, @09:26PM
I may need to upgrade.
This sig for rent.