Increasing your knowledge about ticks and tick encounters will make you better prepared to protect yourself and others.
Black-Legged Ticks (Ixodes Scapularis)
Overview
Black-legged ticks
(a.k.a deer ticks) take 2 years to complete their life cycle and are found predominately in deciduous
forest. Their distribution relies greatly on the distribution of its reproductive host, white-tailed deer.
Both nymph and adult stages transmit diseases such as Lyme disease, Babesiosis, and Anaplasmosis.
Adults
Adult males
and females
are active
October-May, as long as the daytime temperature remains above freezing. Preferring larger hosts, such as
deer, adult blacklegged ticks can be found questing about knee-high on the tips of branches of low growing
shrubs. Adult females readily attack humans and pets. Once females fully engorge on their blood meal, they
drop off the host into the leaf litter, where they can over-winter. Engorged females lay a single egg mass
(up to 1500-2000 eggs) in mid to late May, and then die. Larvae emerge from eggs later in the summer.
Unfed female black-legged ticks are easily distinguished from other ticks by the orange-red body
surrounding the black scutum. Males do not feed.
Larvae
The six-legged larvae
are active July-September and can be found in moist leaf litter. Larvae hatch pathogen-free from eggs, and
remain in the leaf litter where they will attach to nearly any small, medium or large-sized mammal and
many species of birds. Preferred hosts are white-footed mice. Larvae remain attached to their host until
replete, which usually requires 3 days. Once fully engorged, the larvae drop off of the host and molt,
re-emerging the following spring as nymphs.
Nymphs
Nymphs
are
active May-August, and are most commonly found in moist leaf litter in wooded areas, or at the edge of
wooded areas. The eight-legged, pin-head sized nymph typically attaches to smaller mammals such as mice,
voles, and chipmunks, requiring 3-4 days to fully engorge. Nymphs also readily attach to and blood feed
on humans, cats and dogs. Once fed, they drop off into rodent burrows or leaf litter in animal bedding
areas where they molt and emerge as adults in the fall.
Are you concerned about the serious health threat caused by ticks?
Would you like to make appropriate tick-borne diseases prevention programming more widely available? If you answered yes to these questions, please consider supporting the Tick Encounter Resource Center at the University of Rhode Island. Proceeds help support tick-bite prevention programs.