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Comment by rwallace | Hacker News Reader

> There is at least one possible upside: Fire ants love to eat ticks. The area where the fire ants landed may be crawling with stinging ants for a while. “But it’ll have absolutely no ticks. So it’ll be lovely from that perspective,” says Wild.

Sounds like on balance they might do more good than harm, then? Fire ant stings are painful, but they're nothing compared to Lyme disease.

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I'm pretty scared of the Lone Star Tick bite causing me to become allergic to beef.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha-gal_allergy

The fire ants damage many more species than ticks. They've all but destroyed the Texas horned lizard, for example.

Except that fire ant stings are guaranteed to be painful. Not all tick bites are guaranteed to give you Lyme's disease.

I'll take the risk. Lyme's disease is a life long issue. Fire ant stings last about a week at the most.

I thought it was "Lyme disease can be a life long issue"?

It is. If diagnosed early (i.e., during the "bulls eye" stage) about a 2-3 week course of antibiotics will take care of it.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyme_disease#Treatment

I can vouch for this.

About 15 years back I was living in a rural area of New Hampshire and got the "bulls eye" mark on my leg. Never saw the tick in this case but ticks and bites were common around there.

I promptly went to the doctor to get a course of antibiotics and never had further health issues.

Now I'm in rural Texas and surrounded by fire ants. I need to rethink my life choices.

"Chronic Lyme Disease" is pseudoscience.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronic_Lyme_disease

Not sure if this shows 'pseudoscience' or that there is a reported set of symptoms which science hasn't proven or disproven..

Just because there is not scientific evidence doesn't mean something doesn't exist.

This makes fire ants a trade up. Guaranteed pain is always better than a nonzero chance of a permanent crippling disease.

Texas has very few cases of Lyme disease. It's mostly a concern in the northeastern states.

Maaaybe because there's lots of fire ants?

can we import them to CT?

MA to ME already have a different species of Fire ants[0]; from Europe though, not S. America. Please do not purposely import these foreign species.

[0]https://extension.umaine.edu/publications/2550e/

should clarify that I am not serious. I've just had Lyme disease enough times to want to kill ticks.

Better solution, AFAICT, is aggressive reduction in deer populations. Hunting and predator reintroduction to bring deer population down into historical norms would seemingly reduce a major host/transport mechanism, and would have secondary benefits for the hardwood forest ecosystem.

Small rodents/birds are also one of the primary food supplies for larval ticks, so reducing these populations should help to disrupt their life-cycle[0]. The smaller ticks are the ones more likely to infect you as well, since they are harder to spot.

[0] https://www.cdc.gov/lyme/images/lifecycle.jpg

While this is true, the average mouse never goes more that 300 feet from their dwelling. While mice can infect deer ticks with lyme disease, it is deer that are primarily responsible for spreading the disease to new populations.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3072871/

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/07/140701111549.h...

Ah, I'm not saying it is mice that are the vectors, but that mice are a food that keep Deer Ticks alive in the summer months.

Also, from the conclusion of your NIH article:

>Despite a decrease in EM rash incidence, however, we did not find a statistically significant effect of the deer hunt on EM rash incidence, probably due to LD reporting issues, study design limitations, and the small population size.

From what I have read (I do not have the references handy), while they are called deer ticks the primary hosts/transport are mice.

Yes - bring back the wolves!

I was wondering if we could give deer the equivalent of tick/flea collars?

Or maybe put out salt licks where they have to enter through some kind of machine that sprays them with some kind of insecticide.

My other ulterior motive in reducing their population is the forest ecosystem, though.

http://tiee.esa.org/vol/v2/issues/figure_sets/deer/overview....

https://blog.nature.org/science/2013/08/22/too-many-deer/

http://strawberryhill.org/hunting-a-reverence-for-preserving...

the last link has some especially troubling photographs of what I'm talking about; growing up I saw those exclosures all around with much the same effect every time.

Possibly a salt lick that just sterilizes the deer?

>Possibly a salt lick that just sterilizes the deer?

Only after we finish putting chemicals in the water to turn the freaking frogs gay.

Easier to just shoot them. The only vehicle out of the 5 we own that has never had a "deer incident" is the newest one. I also have neighbors who almost died when they hit a deer during a motorcyle ride.

I run into a lot of anti-hunting folks who don't realize that we've run the deer's natural predators out of our land because those predators would hurt us, too. Creatures like bears, wolves, etc. Without nature doing its thing, deer become a hazard to themselves (overeating), a hazard to us (car/deer accidents), a nuisance (deer eating my garden) and an economic threat (deer eating a farmer's field).

Either we need natural population control like bear and wolves and accept that those predators will also eat our children, or we need human-driven population control. Also known as hunting.

Not as crazy an idea as you might think:

http://epi.publichealth.nc.gov/cd/rabies/orv.html

http://www.raboral.com/about-rabies/raboral-v-rg

One thing about small arthropods is that, whatever you do in a large scale against them stops being effective in 2 or 3 years. Always.

But their predators adapt much slowly, so if it is harmful to predators in any way, you trying to kill them will just increase their population.

They've definitely been in TX for at least 40 years, so if they could survive in CT I'm pretty sure they'd already be there by now. Probably too cold.

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