So what’s responsible for the tick boom—and what can we do to keep ourselves safe?As with so much else, climate change is playing a big role in extending ticks’ breeding and biting seasons. Brief, mild winters and long, hot springs and summers are incubators for ticks, especially in the Northeast and the Midwest, which once featured punishingly cold winters, but increasingly do not.
Rising temperatures affect not only the presence of ticks native to a given area, but the migration of new ones. “We’re starting to see southern species of ticks coming north,” says Dina Fonseca, professor and chair of the department of entomology at Rutgers University. “The Gulf Coast tick is now established in New Jersey. Staten Island [New York] has had the Gulf Coast tick for three or four years already, maybe five. It wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for the fact that it’s warmer.
A warming climate also influences the growth of vegetation, with warmer, wetter seasons meaning more leafy ground cover. That, in turn, means more white-tailed deer, mice, and other host animals to which ticks attach themselves for a blood meal—and transportation.It’s not just going for a ramble in the woods that exposes us to ticks. How and where we choose to build homes and other structures matters too. As housing developments continue to sprawl across the U.S.
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Source: MetroUK - 🏆 13. / 82 Read more »