Tick trouble in town

NATURAL PERSPECTIVES

Sometimes we learn about a critter that is so gross, so creepy, or so

disgusting that we just have to write a column about it. We know you

expect no less from us. That brings us to the subject of ticks.

Until recently, we hadn’t encountered many ticks in California.

Vic spends a lot of time afield with his birding classes, so if

either of us were going to become tick-infested, it would most likely

be him. Sure enough, this spring he found one of those eight-legged

little buggers crawling on him in an undisclosed and uniquely male

location. Fortunately, it hadn’t attached and Vic flicked it away

easily.

Ticks tend to crawl around on their intended hosts for a couple of

hours, looking for just the right spot to bite. This generally gives

a person time to check for ticks, which should be done after any hike

in the spring or early summer, particularly after a wet winter like

the one we just had.

Vic’s tick was the first sign of trouble. Then our friend Glee

Gerde mentioned that her dog Nikkei picked up a tick on a walk

through Central Park. When she spotted the offending arachnid in her

dog’s eyebrow, it had swollen to enormous proportions. There are many

methods for getting a tick to release its hold, including holding a

hot match head to the tick’s body, painting it with nail polish, or

dabbing it with lighter fluid, but apparently the accepted method

these days is to pull gently with tweezers until the tick releases

its hold.

We knew there was a serious tick problem this year when Adrianne

Morrison called to report a baby cottontail that someone had found on

the Bolsa Chica mesa. The poor little thing had so many ticks on its

head, all sucking blood, that it was nearly dead. Adrianne and her

assistant, Laura, set about pulling out the ticks and gave it fluids

in an attempt to save its life.

That’s when we decided to do look into what kinds of ticks are in

Orange County and see what kinds of diseases they may carry. Vic is a

tad sensitive on the subject, since he got Lyme disease when he was

bitten by a tick while birding in Georgia about 12 years ago. Our

doctor in California didn’t diagnose it correctly at first because

Lyme disease wasn’t known here at that time. Fortunately, Vic did get

the proper antibiotic treatment eventually, because if left

untreated, Lyme disease can cause heart problems and severe

arthritis.

Lyme disease is now well recognized in California. The spirochaete

bacteria that cause Lyme disease have been found in larval ticks in

most counties in California, including Orange County. Yet there are

very few cases of Lyme disease here. That brings us to the really

fascinating part of our tale.

Of the nine tick species commonly found in California, the Western

black-legged tick is the one most likely to cause us trouble in

Orange County. This tick has a complicated life cycle. The female

tick buries its head in the skin of its host, sucking up a big blood

meal. When it is full, it lays eggs, nearly a thousand of them. It

dies soon after. Eggs deposited in leaf litter or soil hatch into

six-legged larvae. The larvae attach themselves to a host, preferably

a lizard or mouse, where they feed on the blood. When the larvae are

full, they drop off and molt into eight-legged nymphs. The nymphs

likewise look for something to feed upon, preferably a lizard. Then

they drop off and molt into adults, usually during the fall and

winter months. Adults are the ones likely to attach to humans.

The newly hatched adult tick sits on the end of a blade of grass

or a branch, holding out its little legs like an old auntie coming to

kiss you. But as soon as an unsuspecting host walks by, the tick

latches on like a brother-in-law without a job.

If these ticks carry the spirochete bacteria that cause Lyme

disease, then the host they bite will become infected. Lyme disease

is characterized in the early stages by a red, blotchy rash that

expands in a ring around the bite. The rash is usually accompanied by

a fever, headache and muscle or joint pain. If not treated, the

infection can result in heart rhythm abnormalities, nerve damage and

severe arthritis.

Although many tick larvae in California are infected with the Lyme

spirochetes, the incidence of Lyme disease in humans is 400 times

lower here than in Connecticut where the disease was first

recognized. The reason is so bizarre that it boggles the mind. It

seems that when tick nymphs attach to Western fence lizards, a

protective protein in the lizard blood kills the bacteria in the

juvenile tick. After feeding on lizard blood, the nymphs are “cured”

and no longer harbor the bacteria as adults.

So because our western tick nymphs prefer lizards to mice, we are

at lower risk for Lyme disease than our friends on the East Coast,

where the ticks prefer mice and deer. But that doesn’t make finding a

tick crawling on you after a hike any less creepy. We’re headed for

the shower. Writing this gave us the willies.

* VIC LEIPZIG and LOU MURRAY are Huntington Beach residents and

environmentalists. They can be reached at [email protected].