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The Tick Nipper®
Tick Remover for People and Pets
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Simple
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Clean
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Safe
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How Ticks Feed
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How Ticks Feed
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In America there are three subspecies of ticks that feed on people and pets: 1) The dog tick, whose oval-shaped brown body is about an eighth-inch long, 2) the Lone Star tick, which originally hailed from Texas and has a tiny white spot on its back, and 3) the deer tick, which is the size of a sesame seed. The deer tick is the vector of Lyme disease, but all ticks may infect their victims with a dozen diseases, some of them deadly.
The life cycle of the deer tick has three stages: larva, nymph, and adult. The larva is no bigger than the period at the end of this sentence. A larval tick is disease-free, but if its first blood meal contains any disease microbes, they end up inside the tick and can be transmitted to any future host. A year after a deer tick larva hatches and has fed, typically on mice, it molts into a nymph, which is still so small that two could dance on the head of a pin. After the nymph feeds —a second chance to ingest disease— it molts into an adult. A few weeks after the adult female has fed, she lays a tiny caviar-like mass of three to five thousand eggs, then dies, her life cycle having taken two years.
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Ticks like to feed in warm humid weather. You won’t see dog ticks after the first frost in fall and usually not before the last frost in spring, but the hardier deer tick may appear any time of year when the temperature rises above fifty degrees, even in winter. Strangely, in August and early September most ticks are least active, because those who have fed by then are digesting their meals in some reclusive niche near the ground’s surface (moist leaf litter is a favorite encampment), while the others may have desiccated due to lack of moisture during the hot dry summer, and died.
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With only three meals in two years, time goes by slowly for the tick. After each change in life stage, the tick embarks on a wandering quest for its next meal. Ticks are sightless, so they get around by using tiny pincer-like claws on the ends of their eight legs to grab onto rough surfaces —tree bark, edges of foliage, animal fur, clothing fabrics, or human skin (which to a tiny tick is as rough as alligator hide)— then once aboard, they instinctively move opposite the pull of gravity according to a biological trait known as negative geotaxicity. When a tick emerges hungrily from its leaf litter den, it wanders blindly until it bumps into something, then grabs hold and starts climbing upward until it can rise no higher. It pauses on its promontory, reaches out, and waits for some furry hide or scaly epidermis to pass by.
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I once witnessed this antigravity behavior while taking a walk near a New England seashore. Spotting a deer tick crawling up my bare leg, I lifted it off with the tip of a ballpoint pen, then watched it through a twenty-power lens. As I held the pen vertical, the tick crawled steadily up to the very top: when I inverted the pen, the tick quickly turned around and headed upward again. When it again reached the top, it paused on this little tower, then extended its top pair of legs upward and frontward and began rotating each in an arc. Then its second pair of legs reached out to the sides and began rotating there, while the third pair of legs grasped the pen’s tip like King Kong holding onto the Empire State Building, and the bottom pair of legs reached down and back and began waving there. Six of its eight clawed legs were now whirling in six different directions in search of its next ride! If its legs stopped moving, I breathed on them to rev them up again —because carbon dioxide arouses ticks the way smelling salts do us.
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On such summits a tick can remain for months, swinging its legs when it scents the exhalations of a passing animal or feels something brush against it. Then a claw reaches out and grasps a hair or nub of skin and suddenly the parasite is parked beside its next restaurant. However, it does not immediately begin to feed, but wanders around awhile looking for a mate. On human hosts, this ‘dinner and sex’ routine usually leads the female to a warm humid area such as an armpit or the crotch, where, once she is nestled in her moist secluded nook, she feeds to repletion then is impregnated by the male of her choice.
The most amazing part of this bacchanal is the diners’ silverware. For a “spoon” the deer tick has a trowel-shaped hypostome which, although only 1/50 inch long, has more than sixty backward-pointing barbs bristling on its underside. For a “knife and fork” the parasite has two slender chelicerae with rasps on their fronts and barbs on their outsides. When the tick is ready to feed, it places its hypostome’s tip against the victim’s skin, then extends its chelicerae directly above the hypostome where their raspy fronts begin scraping the victim’s skin like the blades of a post-hole digger. After the two chelicerae have dug a shallow hole, they extend further in, spread apart until the barbs on their outsides grab hold of the hole’s sides —then, with the barbs providing an anchor, the tick pulls its body forward which causes the tip of its hypostome to enter the victim’s flesh. The chelicerae continue scraping and digging into the victim’s skin, deepening the cavity, extending further inward, occasionally re-anchoring and pulling the hypostome in further, until the trowel-like hypostome is buried to its hilt in the victim’s flesh. It takes typically half a day for the tick to do this, and then it begins sucking the blood oozing onto its firmly anchored hypostome.
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While the tick has been digging it has engaged in another ingenious act: it has periodically injected an anæsthetic into the area around its excavation so the host can’t feel what it is doing. This is why the tick’s malevolent surgery is never painful —and also why, if you should discover the parasite at work, pulling its firmly anchored mouthparts from your flesh often removes a tiny cornflake-like piece of skin and is accompanied by an uncomfortable tweaking sensation, like the plucking of an eyebrow. The only good news is that during the hours the tick has been digging, the chance of its transmitting disease to its host is low.
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Once the tick is secure, it begins to feed. Experts’ opinions vary as to exactly what happens next. The present consensus is that the first blood that enters the tick’s oral cavity is to this tiny parasite highly viscous. But once the first amount of blood, which if human is about 70 percent water and 30 percent plasma, is in the tick’s stomach, two things happen: 1) from the blood’s water the tick’s digestive processes start making saliva which it sends back onto the hypostome to thin the blood collecting there, making it easier to suck it in, and 2) the blood’s plasma arouses any disease bacteria residing in the tick’s digestive tract, as without food the bacterias’ caloric deficiency has chained them to a torpid state, but once this platter of viands is laid before them they begin to feast and multiply.
As the tick continues to feed and its abdomen swells, its digestive processes produce increasing amounts of saliva and the disease bacteria increase in number. The more saliva the parasite makes, 1) the more dilute becomes the blood oozing onto its hypostome, 2) the more speedily the ever-thinner blood enters its stomach, and 3) the more the microbes lurking there multiply, until eventually a few microbes can’t help but enter the salival current —then the disease flows from inside the tick to inside the host. Now the disease factory is humming. After the tick has fed for three to five days and its body is so bloated it is dangling pendulously from its host, it commits a final diabolical act: it secretes a last burst of saliva around its hypostome to lubricate its removal. Little does it care that by this time a raging torrent of teeming microbes may come gushing with it.
Despite the price in human misery, the tick’s method of feeding is an outstanding example of nature’s biological engineering. The acarine’s utensils and digestive apparatus have been forged painstakingly on the anvil of evolution, until they have become a meticulous means of ensuring this tiny monster’s survival in a hostile world.
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The Tick Nipper®
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Joslyn Designs
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20 Hazel Hill Rd.
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Mahopac, NY 10541
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845.628.0364
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