Ticks have a two-year life cycle during which they have three life stages – larva, nymph, and adult. During each stage, the tick gets blood from a host mammal and then molts into the next stage. After an adult lays her eggs, she dies.
When larval ticks hatch from their eggs, they are not infected with the pathogen that causes Lyme disease. Many ticks will never become infected but others, depending on which host animal they get their first blood from, will become infected.
Despite how greasy and grungy opossums may appear, they actually pay lots of attention to their grooming habits. Opossums encounter thousands of ticks on their body on a weekly basis and end up killing 90% of them during their grooming ritual. Mice, on the other hand do a terrible job grooming ticks off themselves. This, in turn makes them a high rate of service to ticks, and gives them a greater tendency to infect those ticks that remain with the Lyme disease pathogen. Below is a table of information from a lecture presented by Dr. Richard S. Ostfeld. Disease Ecologist. Ph.D. Pretty staggering numbers.
Dr. Ostfeld has found that the more diversity of alternate non-mouse hosts there are for ticks to feed on, the lower the number of Lyme disease infected ticks.
This is partly because other host animals don’t infect larval ticks with Lyme disease at the high rate that mice do, partly because the tick burden per white-footed mouse decreases and partly because some of the alternate hosts, like fox, owls and hawks, do a good job of keeping the mice population in check.
Our local wildlife plays an important role in ours lives whether we see it or not. Please do your part to protect them and our environment.
