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Comment by whiddershins | Hacker News Reader

Ticks are awful. I used to be completely unconcerned by them as a kid, and have a knack for removing them without breaking, but after having a number of family members and pets affected by Lymes I am super careful.

The random tangent about deforestation and global warming seems ideological to me. Ticks aren’t being forced into contact with us, they want to be wherever they can be.

If anything my guess would there’s a problem with lack of predators, like a reduction in possums or something similar.

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> The random tangent about deforestation and global warming seems ideological to me.

The relationship between insect outbreaks and climate change is not ideological and has a number of studies supporting the theory that insect populations increase and migrate due to climate change.

Here's one link [0] culled from a quick search on Google [1]

[0] http://www.bioone.org/doi/abs/10.1641/0006-3568(2001)051[072...

[1] https://www.google.com/search?num=100&source=hp&ei=CNtxWsyxB...

It's really strange... I grew up on a farm and remember running through the fallow fields barefoot with shorts on all summer, but the first time I actually saw a tick was in my mid-20s after I had moved to the city and took a walk through the local park. Since then I've found at least one tick on me every summer.

I don't know if I just got lucky in my youth or if ticks are getting worse, but it's something that's stood out to me as curious.

I've had similar experiences plus I've ran 1000s of Orienteering races through Swedish forests and fields. Never a single tick.

Might be they only go after certain people.

I imagine Sweeden is quite cold, more sparsely populated and you probably haven't destroyed so many forests/wildlife as other countries.

> and you probably haven't destroyed so many forests/wildlife as other countries.

What does this have to do with it? New Hampshire is much more forested than it was 200 years ago. The last two years there have been WAY, WAY more ticks than in the years of my childhood. It's a mini crisis here and is completely unrelated to forest destruction or lack thereof.

It's related to deer, mice and bird populations and to lack of big predators that feed on deer. But it's probably much more complicated.

I had the exact same experience, sans farm. I grew up in a small town, though. Spent a ton of time in the country on friends' farms, lying in long grass in shorts no shirt—all of it. I never had a single tick bite. Horseflies, mosquitoes, spiders, all of that, but never ticks. Even in the city I've (thankfully) never seen one.

Now beaches and parks back there (rural south-western Ontario) are littered with "Tick Warning" signs.

You're not the only one who's confused and curious about it. It's like they used to be a non-issue. We were warned about them, I remember that—but that's all.

Me too. Grew up in the country (running through cornfields etc) in SWO and never had a single tick or even thought about ticks. Then this year my son picked up a small tick in McGregor Park on Lake Huron which thankfully tested negative for Lyme. The areas around the shoreline of Lake Huron seem particularly bad these days.

Also anecdotal but I grew up in California camping and hiking all the time, never once got a tick. I’ve been in the Bay Area for the last eight and a half years, also spending lots of time outside and nothing. Then, about a week ago, I got a tick while hiking in Point Reyes. Not even going through deep woods, just on one of the well maintained coastal trails. Thankfully I caught it early, I felt what I thought was a pimple near my armpit and investigated on the car ride home only to realize that it was quite a large tick

The thing is you might have had ticks on you and not even known it. You have to be very careful to check all over your body. How many people actually do that? Also, the tick might be in your hair, so you might not even see it. Finally, some baby ticks (which can carry Lyme) are smaller than the period at the end of a sentence. They are very hard to spot.

Ya, I'll definitely be searching much more thoroughly now. I was lucky that the tick was huge and hard to miss (though it didn't feel that way at the time)

Times have changed. Ticks in the old days weren't all that prevalent and/or carying Lyme. It has worsened after habitat destruction (less wolves and other big predators, more deer that act as tick breeding ground, more mice that act as Lyme reservoir, more migration).

Has the population of the things that eat the ticks declined too?

They're insects, I don't think it has anything to do with natural predators but rather environment conditions, their food source and breeding grounds. Just like with the tiger mosquito, climate and car tyres.

I had the same anecdotal experience from the North East of the US, maybe once every two or three years one tick - now I can expect to find one anytime I walk in long grass.

My thought is the increase in ticks is due to the elimination of widespread DDT spaying, check out this typical scene from 1950's and 60's:

http://slideplayer.com/slide/5357033/17/images/22/to+Humans+...

On the positive side, I never saw a hawk or eagle when I was growing up, and they have returned since they are no longer being pressured by insecticide concentration in their food chain. Maybe we could strike a compromise, bomb tick infested areas for a year or two with DDT to knock down the ticks.

[edit] A red tailed hawk just perched in the tree outside my window.

Well, warmer winters don't suppress the native populations, causing population explosions the following summer.

> If anything my guess would there’s a problem with lack of predators, like a reduction in possums or something similar.

Indeed the abundance of predators, notably martens and foxes, in some areas has been linked with a decrease in infected ticks. http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/284/1859/2017...

In the NE its largely because of exploding deer & mice populations, 30 years ago they were rare, now its normal to see deer in West Chester & NJ suburbs.

Bring back coyotes.

One theory is that coyotes displace foxes, which are better at reducing disease-carrying mice populations: http://www.caryinstitute.org/newsroom/fox-and-coyote-and-tic...

"The random tangent about deforestation and global warming seems ideological to me. Ticks aren’t being forced into contact with us, they want to be wherever they can be." - Living in proximity to forest fragmentation is a major risk factor associated with Lyme and other tickborne disease in the United States, and forestry workers worldwide are at staggeringly high risks.

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