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Reducing tick density along recreational trails in Ottawa, Canada
- opwieurposiu 4mo agoIf you are out in the woods and you come upon a roughly circular area of crushed down grass, that is a deer bed. Try and avoid walking through it, deer beds are full of ticks. The deer trails are a lot harder to avoid.
- umpalumpaaa 4mo agoI avoid grass all together- especially in the woods.
- Insanity 4mo agoOr avoid the trails all-together. Given the 30th anniversary of Trainspotting this seems relevant: https://youtu.be/xtbS_PdA198?si=8ba8Fp8_uzdpIq6J https://youtu.be/xtbS_PdA198?si=8ba8Fp8_uzdpIq6J. I’m pretty wary of ticks, when you go for hikes just do a body check after. Also, I tend to go with long pants (even in summer, I dislike bugs more than the sweat). Plus a lightweight windbreaker can help to cover upper body. Plus it limits sun exposure which is also harmful.
- twoWhlsGud 4mo agoAnd if you're wearing long sleeves and long pants, you can apply permethrin in a semi permanent way to your clothing to discourage ticks and mosquitoes: https://www.consumerreports.org/health/insect-repellent/is-permethrin-treated-clothing-safe-and-effective-a7181708753/ https://www.consumerreports.org/health/insect-repellent/is-p...
- Dumblydorr 4mo agoDo not do so if a cat will be anywhere near the clothes or compound. It’s super harmful to cats.
- sarchertech 4mo agoLethal dermal exposure is somewhere near 100mg/kg. I probably wouldn’t wear permethrin treated pants and let a cat sit on my lap, but “anywhere near the clothes” is a pretty big exaggeration of the danger. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10822630/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10822630/
- topgrain2 4mo agoLinen clothes are awesome. Long trousers and long sleeves and almost as cool as short sleeves and shorts in shade, and cooler in direct sun.
- littlestymaar 4mo agoLinen is the most underappreciated fabric. It's cool in both ways. I don't understand why so few people wear linen in summer.
- Analemma_ 4mo agoSome people don't like the scratchy feel of linen compared to cotton, although there are now linen-synthetic blends which ameliorate this almost entirely.
- mc32 4mo agoI have not come across linens that are scratchy. They can be coarse but not scratchy. Blends can be fine fibers. Coarse wool I do find scratchy, unless it’s cold then the scratchiness goes away. Seems like Belgian linen is good.
- SoftTalker 4mo agoCost, more complicated in the laundry, prone to wrinkling, and air-conditioning. Linen clothing was more popular before AC was invented.
- Y-bar 4mo agoHow is it really more complicated in the laundry? Most of my linen can do 60C washing cycle (”hot” I think it is called in USA) which is pretty much ”throw it in there with similar colours and forget about it” territory. The wrinkles are a bit of the charm I think, might be easier to accept if you make it part of the fashion instead of fighting it.
- 4mo ago
- goda90 4mo agoTicks want to be on your neck or in your hair more than anything, so long clothes can give them a route that you can't feel them crawling on.
- cortesoft 4mo agoMy body helps me with this goal by being ridiculously allergic to all grasses.
- nik282000 4mo agoIf I'm going off trail I cram my jeans into my boots and shake everything out before getting in the car. Ontario ticks are just a part of the experience now :/
- victorbjorklund 4mo agoNot sure if it was a deer bed or what but when I was kid I lay down in the grass and when I got up I had over 100 ticks on my shirt.
- beautiful_apple 4mo ago> Twenty 50-m trail segments across two sites were randomly assigned to intervention groups: untreated woodchip borders, deltamethrin-treated woodchip borders, and ten assigned to untreated controls. > Treated woodchips reduced I. scapularis adult and nymph density by 99 % (incidence rate ratio (IRR) = 0.01, 95 % CI: 0.001–0.08) relative to controls, while untreated woodchips achieved a 48 % reduction (IRR = 0.52, 95 % CI: 0.34–0.78).
- washbasin 4mo agoThrough a combination of two of my hobbies, I learned that pyrethroids are toxic to aquatic animals. Glad to see that they used "locations [that] were situated away from waterbodies". Pyrethroids are very powerful tools for insect control (and non-toxic to humans) but any place where you have runoff or ground seepage is going to be a problem. Aren't those places the ones most likely for ticks to thrive -- areas near bodies of water where animals like deer come to drink? So hot take: this would only be useful in places where there are not a lot of ticks? (PS: Permethrin-sprayed clothing is very effective.)
- e28eta 4mo agoThey’re also very toxic to cats, which is why dogs & cats have different flea & tick medicines.
- zukzuk 4mo agoAlso bad news if your dog is prone to seizures, as mine was.
- pfdietz 4mo agoThis reminds me I need to respray my tick pants. Thanks.
- MegaDeKay 4mo agoDeer ticks will go after pretty much anything warm blooded: coyotes, mice, dogs, etc etc etc. Proximity to water doesn't seem to factor much either. Where I live, ticks this year are horrendous and everywhere.
- tamimio 4mo agoI got bitten by a mosquito in Ottawa a couple years ago that sent me to the hospital.. I stopped near the river while cycling to see a raccoon for few seconds, was more than enough for that lil sucker to do the job.
- pfdietz 4mo agoThere are some potentially very nasty diseases spread by ticks and insects. For example, flaviviruses like West Nile, Dengue, and Powassan (which debilitated and ultimately killed the wife of Canadian fantasy author Charles de Lint.)
- mr_toad 4mo agoNot to mention Malaria, which kills over half a million people a year.
- intrasight 4mo agoAnd has killed a large fraction of all humans who have ever lived.
- OutOfHere 4mo agoIt has, but it also has saved a lot of people by slowing down invasions.
- BigTTYGothGF 4mo agoArthropods of all (most) sorts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbovirus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbovirus
- winxton 4mo agoI got bitten by a tick at a cottage near Ottawa and got a fever then bell's palsy a month later. I didn't even notice I got bit at all at the time. A year later, I went to the hospital for a swollen knee and had surgery done, and ended up being tested positive for lyme disease. The doc says you're too young to have bell's palsy and arthritis. Careful out there!
- aaron695 4mo ago[dead]
- bluerooibos 4mo agoAnother worrying proxy for how deeply climate change is bleeding into everyday life: coffee prices, orange juice prices, and now having to engineer huge trail areas with woodchips just so people can avoid being bitten by exploding tick populations.
- mantas 4mo agoTicks are a problem regardless. And they don’t like too much heat. So climate warming may even reduce their population in some parts. Or, more likely, move them up north. Giving relieve to some and headache to others… Lyme disease vaccine would help a ton though. I’ve had Lyme 3 times by now. Thankfully encephalitis stab is a thing.
- Dumblydorr 4mo agoThey don’t like heat? That seems incorrect. If true, Then why are they a huge problem in TX and other southerly areas, and are only now spreading north?
- bluGill 4mo agoThey are a huge problem in Minnesota as well.
- SoftTalker 4mo agoDifferent species I belive. Ticks in Texas are differnent from ticks in Ottowa. Most lyme disease in the US is concentrated in the northeast and northern great lakes states and into Canada (though it is spreading over the past few decades). https://www.cdc.gov/lyme/data-research/facts-stats/lyme-disease-case-map.html https://www.cdc.gov/lyme/data-research/facts-stats/lyme-dise...
- to11mtm 4mo agoCorrect. Texas has the 'Lone star Tick' primarily. But in Michigan for example we've had the Blacklegged tick (which is the main species known to carry Lyme in our state...) for a looong time.
- Hnrobert42 4mo agoCalls to mind one of my favorite Simpsons moments. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NGv6RASFsY4&t=26s https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NGv6RASFsY4&t=26s
- kbaker 4mo agoWe have (had?) some ticks in our backyard and I came across these which I thought was a clever attack angle: tick tubes. Permethrin-soaked cotton balls in a tube, mice find them and build nests out of the freely available cotton, ticks that the mice have gathered while walking around die when they come back to the nest.
- felix-the-cat 4mo agoIt does work a little, but it's even more effective to just get some chickens. I did find permethrin works great on clothing - when I used to go hunting a lot I'd get ticks on me every time, and the thing is they climb off of your boots in the car and go under the seats or wherever so you don't get bitten until three days later when you're driving back from grocery shopping or whatever. After I started using permethrin and sprayed the floor of my car with it I never saw another tick again.
- greenavocado 4mo agoWow this is extremely insightful. I need to spray my car floor since I live in tick country.
- mrWiz 4mo agoChickens are very effective at removing ticks, but “just” getting some chickens is a little bit more work than tossing tubes outside.
- PunchyHamster 4mo agoThat's like saying "to stop having to weed the garden just get some goats"
- tclancy 4mo agoWould want to be careful if you have cats. Also appears to not be readily available in the EU? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permethrin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permethrin - see other animals, I can never get anchor links to copy on mobile.
- 4mo ago
- nephihaha 4mo agoSome birds eat ticks including guinea fowl of all things.
- matsemann 4mo agoNo ticks at the altitude I reside. But with global warming it's slowly creeping up towards the towns further down. Same with Spanish slugs. Will soon be able to thrive here as well.
- sojournerc 4mo agoWe have dog ticks at 8000 feet in Colorado, not sure how much altitude affects them.
- estearum 4mo agoI think temperature is the relevant variable
- abc123abc123 4mo agoI think the OP was thinking about northern europe. Less ticks far up north.
- sojournerc 4mo agoIt still gets cold in the winter (negative 15-20 degrees F) where I am, and even though we had a relatively mild winter, ticks are about the same. There's a tendency today to attribute everything to climate change, but it should be backed by actual data. It's a sort of attribution bias that to me just feels lazy. There could be a lot of reasons why ticks might spread. I have lived here 10 years, and haven't noticed an increase or decrease in ticks year over year. Just my anecdata.
- estearum 4mo ago... is this a serious comment? > explanations should be backed by data, it's lazy otherwise > I personally haven't noticed an increase The relationship between temperature, wetness/humidity, and tick range is extremely well-understood. Altitude is not a relevant variable compared to and controlling for temperature and humidity. We know under what conditions different tick specie thrive versus die, and we know that as the years go on, there are far more areas under "tick-thriving" conditions for far longer periods, at least for the disease-carrying tick specie that we tend to care about. No one mentioned anything about climate change except you, reflexively and defensively, for some odd reason.
- pcmaffey 4mo agoA healthy wolf population is the proper (trophic cascading) solution to the tick epidemic.
- roshin 4mo agoI would much rather encounter a hungry tick on a recreational trail than a hungry wolf
- rescripting 4mo agoA hungry tick is much more likely to make your life miserable because you’re significantly more likely to encounter one in ecosystems with both species.
- trollbridge 4mo agoMake sure the wolves are well fed.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- orbital-decay 4mo agoYou just have to outrun the other hikers.
- jmye 4mo agoGiven the utter paucity of wolf attacks on humans (vastly, incomprehensibly lower than the rates of Lyme disease), this is a deeply silly thing to worry about. It’s really clear, sometimes, who hasn’t seen a place that isn’t paved.
- Earw0rm 4mo agoThis feels like a generalisable cognitive bug with our species. "Kill all the wolves, die as a result from invisible bacteria carried by tiny arthropods - or from Type 2 diabetic heart failure, as getting out for a hike and staying safe is now too much hassle".
- DivingForGold 4mo agoDon't know which is worse - - contracting Lyme disease, or Parkinson's disease from Permethrin and other pesticide exposure: https://beyondpesticides.org/dailynewsblog/2009/09/occupational-use-of-2-4-d-permethrin-triple-the-risk-of-parkinsons-disease/ https://beyondpesticides.org/dailynewsblog/2009/09/occupatio... https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27756609/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27756609/
- beautiful_apple 4mo agoWhat's interesting about this study is that ticks were reduced by 50% with untreated woodchips (no pesticides!)
- hammock 4mo agoI mean, yeah. Ticks live in grasses not on the ground. If you walk on bare trail and don’t brush on grass or other plants your chance of a tick is much lower
- HappySweeney 4mo agoThey measured density, not the probability of getting one.
- hammock 4mo agoDo you think those are maybe correlated? The measured density on the path
- cactusplant7374 4mo agoIt's only hazardous when wet. I spray my clothes and then let them dry on the clothesline.
- wahnfrieden 4mo agoDon't sweat?
- pluralmonad 4mo agoI've spread beneficial nematodes several times before and the following 2-3 years I get notably fewer tick bites. They are a bit of a pain to spread over any significant area.
- andrewl 4mo agoCan you give us some more detail on the nematodes, or point us to an article?
- j_bum 4mo agoCommenting for future reference in case OP ever responds. Would love to learn more
- pluralmonad 4mo agoResponded to sibling comment.
- ethersteeds 4mo agoThis site [1] appears to have a good overview. There's several common beneficial nematode species, selection is based on factors such as their affinity for your intended pest, "cruising depth" in soil, and the current soil temperature. I see several sources specifically recommending a mix of the Steinernema feltiae (Sf) and Heterorhabditis bacteriophora (Hb) beneficial nematode species for tick control applications. Live organisms are shipped with ice packs and typically must be kept refrigerated and applied within a 1 month window. Application is typically performed with a garden hose and a mixing applicator attachment. Nematodes are sensitive to sunlight, application is typically best performed in the evening to allow them time get underground. One US vendor in this space I'm familiar with (no affiliation) is Nature's Good Guys. Their product recommendations for tick control are here[2]; they offer applicators as well. [1] https://progardenreview.com/nematodes-for-tick-control/ https://progardenreview.com/nematodes-for-tick-control/ [2] https://www.naturesgoodguys.com/collections/tick-control https://www.naturesgoodguys.com/collections/tick-control
- 4mo ago
- gcanyon 4mo agoSeems likely that ticks should go in the same category as mosquitoes -- how long until we use gene-drive tech to completely eradicate them?
- ravetcofx 4mo agoAt what cost to the larger ecosystem. They are the base of a larger food web. Many creatures rely on eating them
- boxed 4mo agoWhat are you talking about? That's absolutely not the case for ticks. And for mosquitos it's often doubtful at best, and false when it comes to disease carrying species as there are plenty of other species available.
- microgpt 4mo ago[dead]
- olejorgenb 4mo agoThis wasp seems quite specialized towards ticks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ixodiphagus_hookeri https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ixodiphagus_hookeri
- boxed 4mo agoSure. And those wasps maybe has other parasitic wasps, and those parasit wasps maybe have flees, who have bacterial diseases, who have viral diseases. All of them parasitic and all who would go extinct when that species goes extinct. But that's not what the previous poster was talking about. This is not the basis of a food web, that's just a parasitic cul de sac. And there are basically infinite such things in nature.
- wolvesechoes 4mo agoMany birds feed on ticks. Some beetles and amphibians as well.
- bhouston 4mo agoWe need a vaccine for Lyme disease, it would be a lot more effective than paying $3K per kilometre of path per year.
- DGAP 4mo agoOne existed, it was pulled from the market in the early 2000s. There's still a dog one, and there is at least one which is in late stage trials in the US today.
- acdha 4mo agoThanks to barratry the one developed in the 90s was pulled from the market on spurious grounds: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2870557/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2870557/ The good news is that there’s a promising new one in the pipeline but Lyme is only one of the diseases which ticks spread: https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-detail/pfizer-and-valneva-announce-lyme-disease-vaccine-candidate https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-deta...
- OutOfHere 4mo agoIt will be good to have, but it will make people more negligent, as there exist lots of bad tick based diseases, not just Lyme.
- PeterStuer 4mo agoWearing appropriate clothing for walking grassy trails is 95% of the solution. Decent walking boots, trousers in socks and a long sleeved shirt goes a very long way. And no, it does not have to be too warm if you use an appropriate light and wicking fabric.
- amelius 4mo ago> deltamethrin-treated woodchip Great, more insecticides :( Now even in places we least expect them.
- danubis 4mo agoReally the best is to check for ticks and weird bruises with a partner every so often. Got Lyme disease from a tick years ago and it was very visible -> a spreading red bruise with a white middle (it get bigger and looks like it's not healing) When spotted some antibiotics did their jobs in two weeks if I remember correctly. I should check the other diseases' visual clues too.
- goda90 4mo agoNot every case of Lyme disease has said bruise, and there's other tick borne diseases that ticks pass to you faster post-bite and are harder to treat than early onset Lyme disease is. The best is to never get bitten at all.
- e40 4mo agoI’ve know people that took a very long time to beat Lyme, through multiple rounds of antibiotics. Avoidance is very much the best path.
- wolvesechoes 4mo agoI am grateful that everything points to the fact I was able to aquire tick resistance. Bites get itchy the moment ticks start to feed, and nymphs die in a matter of minutes while feeding on me.