It’s Tick Time
A tick will sneak up on you or your dog, take up residence on your body, administer a painless bite into the skin and engorge itself with blood. A single tick bite can transmit multiple pathogens as well as creating secondary infections and allergic reactions. Do you know what to do and how to protect yourself?
What is a tick? mate. Opportunistically, the male tick sometimes feeds, not on the host, but on an engorged female.
When the female hard tick abandons her feeding site, she lays a batch of 10,000 or more eggs and then dies, according to the Pest Products Internet site. (The male typically dies soon after mating.)
Tick offspring passes through four life cycle stages. First, is the egg stage. Second, the newly hatched larva, or “seed” tick, which has only six legs, immediately begins to seek its blood fortune. With luck, the young tick will attach itself to a small mammal or reptile. Third, after engorging, probably over no more than several hours, it will molt, emerge as a nymph, now with its full complement of eight legs. The new nymph tick repeats the feeding cycle, taking longer to engorge itself. Fourth, the tick will molt once more, now emerging as an eight-legged adult tick. The adult ticks repeat the feeding cycle over a several day period, which will culminate in reproduction and death.
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