Hacker News Reader

Comment by strangesmells06 | Hacker News Reader

My understanding of exponential growth is that if a tick produces a thousand offspring every year over 7 years you would have around 1e+21 ticks.

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.

View on HN

> something's not adding up here

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.

So there are limitations which are left out of this article which seems to promote fear based journalism.

Because they leave out important info it makes it hard to judge appropriate alarm level which makes it clickbait and I will ignore it.

The article says that one Asian longhorned tick “can lay up to 2,000 eggs without needing to mate” (emphasis mine). This doesn’t imply that this tick breed generally has an effective reproduction rate of 2000, let alone that this rate was annual.

As fun as "a massive sphere of infinitely expanding ticks dwarfing out all light" sounds, we unfortunately cannot have more ticks than the biomass needed to support them, including their own. Also, this kind of assumes an infinite supply of cows/people/other juicy critters, which brings its own problemas.

ok so we can stop this tick threat in its tracks if we just kill everyone and everything first.

Available resources…that’s the term you lack…

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.

So according to my original comment observation, there are limitations on this tick growth which the article leaves out in favor of fear based journalism.

Because they leave out important info it makes it hard to judge appropriate response which makes it clear clickbait to be ignored.

So yes, there are limitations on this tick growth. The article does not leave it -- they mention ticks essentially draining cows from their blood. This is the limit of how many ticks a cow can support, biologically.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com