However these tics have been around since 2017 so I'm assuming there's some limitation that isn't mentioned in the article that has stopped them from taking over.
So I see no logical contradiction by saying "these ticks have been around since 2017" and "entire country is about to be infested".
The old math question asks, "Duckweed is spreading on a lake. It takes 1 year to double the area of duckweed. From start to end, it took 15 years to cover entire lake. Which year the duckweed covers half of the lake?"
Exponential growth has this feature that for a long time it seems fine and then suddenly it is over as it overload's the physical capacity to handle it.
And I would say 7 years to get to the current state is extremely fast rate and definitely cause for alarm in my opinion.
The milky way is only 1e+18km wide.
This would suggest at present our solar system should be a massive sphere of infinitely expanding ticks dwarfing out all light, life and matter and further expanding into the cosmos and in another few years of tick exponential growth will overwhelm the milky way with tick mass, and then eventually not long after the entire universe will just become a large sphere of infinitely expanding ticks.
And apprently ticks can reproduce more than 1000 offspring and also can live more than one year so this is a conservative estimate.
Unless the big bang was tick based....something's not adding up here.
Or possibly you and the journalist dont fully appreciate how big exponential growth really is.
Ticks don’t care about the Tragedy of the Commons (livestock grazing one area with multiple owners not responsible for the land means they eat everything).
Tick population will level off once the resource (blood) is maxed out.
Because they leave out important info it makes it hard to judge appropriate response which makes it clear clickbait to be ignored.
One factor might be that reproduction rate ≠ survival rate, i.e., not all of the ticks born will reproduce. For example, it usually takes several growth stages for ticks to reach fertility, where each of these phases require a blood meal. So if they don’t find a suitable host in time, they starve to death. Or they are eaten themselves by another predator, etc.
Because they leave out important info it makes it hard to judge appropriate alarm level which makes it clickbait and I will ignore it.
That doesn't mean they won't hit some natural limitation on their range at some point but it's not obvious to me they're there yet.
From the article:
> Though Asian longhorned ticks can carry diseases that infect humans, they are not yet considered a threat to human health in the U.S., per the statement.
We need to eat.
Tick-borne disease is the primary risk. It only takes one bite to get a pretty severe disease. If these don’t carry the tick-borne diseases, they’re a nuisance but not a huge risk.