Author: Leah Rosenbaum / Source: Science News
Tadhgh Rainey has seen his share of bloodsuckers.
As an entomologist at the Hunterdon County Health Services in Flemington, N.J., he’s the person to talk to about all things mosquitoes and ticks. But he had never seen anything like the infestation on a pet sheep in September 2017.When he and his colleague entered the sheep’s enclosure, “we almost immediately got covered in ticks,” he says. “I couldn’t believe this sheep was alive.” It was covered in hundreds, maybe thousands, of ticks.
Unable to identify the ticks, Rainey sent samples to labs across the country. One went to Andrea Egizi, an entomologist at Rutgers School of Environmental and Biological Sciences in New Brunswick, N.J. Egizi analyzed the tick’s DNA, and was shocked when the identification came back as Haemaphysalis longicornis, a native of East Asia.
Known as the longhorned tick or bush tick, H. longicornis is ubiquitous in Japan, China and the Korean Peninsula. The New Jersey sheep was the first documented sighting in the continental United States, say Rainey and Egizi, who published their findings online February 19 in the Journal of Medical Entomology.
Scientists say that it is rare to find an invasive tick species in the wild. And this one seems to be spreading. It has been discovered in at least three more states — Virginia, West Virginia and Arkansas — and warnings have been issued for Maryland.
Here are five reasons why scientists are keeping an eye on this sneaky invader.
1. This tick can clone itself.
After a female longhorned tick feeds, she will lay up to 2,000 genetically identical eggs. Two to three months later, the eggs hatch without any male fertilization, and become mini copies of their mom. It is unclear how many ticks practice this rare form of asexual reproduction called parthenogenesis; so far, scientists have found fewer than 20 that reproduce this way, out of more than 800 tick species worldwide.
The process is “pretty alarming,” says medical entomologist Neeta Connally at…
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