Ticked Off, Part 1

We have three members of the arachnid class of insects around the homestead (other than many spiders), that are not really insects at all. (Insects have six legs, arachnids have eight.) All three are closely related: the wood tick, the deer tick, and the chigger. All three of them I consider pests and would be thrilled if they decided to emigrate elsewhere. All three have bitten us, causing suffering of one sort or another.

Ticks are giant mites (mighty mites). They are incredibly populous, so I guess there’s no getting rid of them—unless we and all other mammals vacate the area too. There can be millions of them inhabiting one acre of woodland—so they’ve also got us badly outnumbered. Like its distantly-related pest the mosquito, it’s usually the female tick that is the greatest bother. She feeds until she bloats herself way up, in order to get enough energy to lay her eggs.

I’ve written about deer ticks before (10/30/08). They are more than just a pest—they can be downright dangerous as purveyors of Lyme disease. They’re also problematic, because they’re so tiny. You almost can’t see one, until it’s been attached for a few days and has bloated up, engorged with your blood. If you do find a deer tick on you within a few hours of attaching itself, you can pick it off before the Lyme disease bacteria enter your bloodstream. That may sound reasonable, but it requires a minute inspection of every inch of your skin every few hours—not something that one can do alone, and not something you may want your companion to do for you.

Fortunately we are not on high deer tick alert around here, as Lyme disease is not common in our remote corner of the county. (This disease is far more prevalent in areas where a large number of people rubs shoulders with a large number of deer: in suburban communities.) So, although Lyme disease is a serious problem if you contact it, the chances for us are rather low that we’ll get bit by a deer tick and even when we do, that the bugger will be carrying the dreaded bacteria. Health officials—ultra cautious folks, when it comes to communicable diseases—would have you immediately sign on for a lengthy and costly course of antibiotics, if you even think you’ve been bitten by a deer tick. Although that may be a safe path, it’s a little extreme for us.

A mite that is even smaller than the deer tick (a mite smaller, that is) is the harvestman—better known around these parts as the chigger. These guys are about the size of a period at the end of this sentence (right here). They love to wait in ambush in weedy, grassy patches that are about a foot high. If you’re foolish enough to wander through such a patch with your pants legs hanging loose, a chigger will leap to your shoes. Then it’ll commence crawling up your leg, until it gets stopped by a tight waistband or other obstruction.

Now it’s in a nice cozy spot, so it sticks out its proboscis, buries it into a skin pore, and begins to excrete an enzyme that dissolves a few cells of your skin. The chigger slurps up its meal and lets go, dropping back to the ground, satiated. You, the host, have been ignorant of this invasion, until the next day, when the invasion site has become very itchy. It’ll remain so for several days, no matter what you do. The best palliative is to daub the spot with nail polish (I like a shocking pink color) as soon as you notice it—but the polish helps only a little.

A common misbelieve about chiggers is that they burrow into your skin and must be dug out or be suffocated with the nail polish. But the critter ain’t there; it’s long gone and you’re suffering from the assault of its spit on your immune system. It’s one of nature’s many lessons for developing human fortitude.

Next time: the wood tick.