Retired Nova Scotia Wildlife Biologist Gets It Done
Curious to learn more about tick populations in his neighbourhood, a retired NS wildlife biologist tied an old t-shirt to a ski pole and spent five years systematically dragging the woods behind his home each May hoping to capture some ticks. He later handed the hundreds of ticks in his collection over to researchers for further study. Read the article on CBC News.

When I was scanning tick related headlines the other day, I ran across a story that made me growl. It was this story about alpha-gal syndrome (AGS) which, in the last several years, has become something of a media darling in Canada. AGS is a rare red meat allergy that is sometimes (read: rarely) caused by the bite of a lone star tick, and has the potential to be quite severe. In the case highlighted in the linked article, it was fatal. So, yikes!

I was scrolling through the list of ticks catalogued on this site the other day and noticed that a few are missing that deserve to be mentioned. Ixodes spinipalpis (no common name), for instance. The fact that this tick has no common name gives away something important about it: it's not very well known.

Early this year, I wrote a post talking about a newly identified tick species that may or may not be making its home in British Columbia. Since then, a collaborative study has been published by researchers in Ontario and Alberta that attempts to map out the current locations of Dermacentor similis ticks in Western Canada and the United States as well as identifying where they are likely to spread in the foreseeable future.