An Invasive Tick That Can Clone Itself Is Spreading Across the U.S.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/an-invasive-tick-that-can-clone-itself-is-spreading-across-us-threatening-livestock-180983323/

by derbOac • 3 years ago

86 95 3 years ago

smithsonianmag.com

throwaway2907• 3 years ago

If it reproduces by cloning, it should be relatively easy to eradicate at once. You only need one specimen...

Jtsummers• 3 years ago

"Can clone themselves" but they don't always. They're also capable of sexual reproduction. The asexual reproduction is the part that's letting them spread so rapidly, though.

So, no, you don't just need one specimen.

rf15• 3 years ago

What kind of approach do you see here? Yes you can create an infinite amount of samples to test on, but you still have to deal with the millions of copies in the wild.

throwaway2907• 3 years ago

If it's a copy of the same thing then any measure that works against one would work against all. Other ways of reproduction add randomness and mutations which make it difficult

Angostura2• 3 years ago

I don't see why that is true at all. Aphids reproduce through parthenogenesis, killing aphids is still tricky.

wiz21c2• 3 years ago

you mean parthogenesis ?

throwaway2907• 3 years ago

Being able to reproduce by parthogenesis (in addition to reproduction via mating) is not the same as only reproducing by cloning.

otikik• 3 years ago

- No problem. We simply unleash wave after wave of Chinese fire ants. They’ll wipe out the ticks.

- But aren’t the ants even worse?

- Yes, but we’re prepared for that. We’ve lined up a fabulous type of spider that thrives on ant meat.

- But then we’re stuck with spiders!

- No, that’s the beautiful part. When wintertime rolls around, the spiders simply freeze to death.

Xylakant• 3 years ago

Enter climate change and warming temperatures in winter.

mettamage2• 3 years ago

The US as a whole does not have cold winters. States like Florida would still have those spiders.

hutzlibu3• 3 years ago

I don't understand this comment. Is it a joke? Why would the cloning matter? All of the clones can clone, which just means laying eggs without finding a mate.

amelius• 3 years ago

Probably because we know its entire genome?

gardenhedge• 3 years ago

"Though Asian longhorned ticks can carry diseases that infect humans, they are not yet considered a threat to human health in the U.S., per the statement"

2devnull2• 3 years ago

“Yet”?!

rapjr94• 3 years ago

The US seems to have no defense against invasive pests, plant, animal or insect, it just lets them spread.

ipsum2• 3 years ago

You only hear about the ones that do spread.

traceroute66• 3 years ago

The US seems to have no defense against invasive pests, plant, animal or insect, it just lets them spread.

A large portion of that is inevitably of the US's own doing through its love of intensive agriculture.

Liberal use of hormones and antibiotics in animals, liberal use of pesticides etc. etc.

Not saying no other country in the world uses antibiotics or pesticides, but the US does it more intensively and more extensively than almost any other country on the planet.

You then end up having to fight fire with fire as things build up resistance.

autoexec• 3 years ago

Global warming isn't helping things either. Lots of pests that used to stay down south are marching north as the years warm.

liotier2• 3 years ago

Liberal use of hormones

Damn liberals, ruining everything... I bet those are sex change hormones !

acomjean• 3 years ago

There are some government programs to limit the spread. I know there is an Asian longhorn beetle program and some others for invasive plants out west (source my brother worked on them).

bigbillheck• 3 years ago

It only seems that way if you don't pay attention. For example: https://www.invasivespeciesinfo.gov/take-action , and there's lots of stuff at the state and local levels (if you don't believe me, call your friendly neighborhood extension agent)

rapjr94• 3 years ago

That's great and I do see things like that:

https://vtinvasives.org/news-events/events/mapping-event-bra...

Are they actually effective? The above is local to just one town, if the next town over doesn't do anything the weed spreads anyway. There are also areas where no one ever goes like parts of national forests. Have any of these efforts done more than delay an invasive? I'm thinking of kudzu and pine beetles. I wonder if pine beetles are creating more CO2 than cars by killing trees. The problems seem complex and not easily solved, so it would seem the appropriate response would be to train more people who can do studies and find answers. Instead it's left up to local communities to form groups and try brute force approaches.

darkerside2• 3 years ago

Survivorship bias. They may do a great job against 80% of species, and you'd probably never notice.

rabbits_2002• 3 years ago

Most of the time there is pretty much nothing you can do. They don’t make selective pesticides.

tzs• 3 years ago

You can actually make selective pesticides, but the people that pay for pesticide development can make a lot more money with non-selective pesticides.

Much of the behavior and life cycle of insects is controlled by a variety of hormones. For example suppose you've got an insect that needs to lay its eggs when the weather starts to cool at the end of summer because they eggs will die if it is too hot, but before the weather gets too cold. And suppose that after mating the males die.

There will likely be some hormone that gets triggered by weather changes that will cause the "find a mate and lay eggs" subroutine hard wired into the insect's brain to run. (Much of insect behavior is essentially hard wired routines that get invoked by a complex hormone drive state machine).

If you identify what hormone that is, you might be able to make a pesticide based on it that if you spray it earlier in the summer, when it is still too hot for the eggs, will trigger the "mate and lay eggs" routine. The insects will mate and lay eggs, and the summer heat will kill the eggs. And the males have mated so they die. So when the weather starts to change and the hormone is active again in the females there are no males to mate with them.

Unlike pesticides that work by disrupting something necessary to life in general, which then tend to kill things other than the target either by being sprayed on them, or by things higher in the food chain eating things that were sprayed (or eating things that ate those things, and so on), they hormone pesticides tend to be a lot safer for other species.

That's because the target insect does naturally produce the hormone, so it is already in the food chain. Most other things in the same ecosystems as the target insect will have already evolved to not be too bothered by it.

What holds these kind of pesticides back is that to develop them you have to have researchers who delve very deeply into the biology of the target insect. There are a lot of different insect species, and even if you just care about pest insects there are still a lot, and you've got to do each species separately. There isn't enough funding to produce enough PhD entomologists to get the number of specialists you'd need to do the research.

A similar thing happens with with biological control of pest insects. If you've got an invasive insect that native predators and parasites won't control, one way you might deal with it is bring in its predators or parasites.

Often bringing in non-native predators or parasites is a very bad idea, because they often also go after native species. With insects though it can often be done safely. As with much other insect behavior, what insects predators insects pray upon is often very specific. They might only go after one specific species. Same with parasites. If you've got an insect that is kept under control because some parasitic wasp lays eggs in them, that wasp might lay eggs in only that specific species. If that species becomes invasive somewhere else and you bring in the wasps, they won't hurt anything else.

But to make that work, as with hormonal pesticides, you need to know a whole lot about the predators and parasites of your pest. But there aren't many openings for the PhD entomologists it would take for that.

An example of this was a few decades ago there was some invasive species from I think Florida that was devastating California citrus crops. To try to control it they brought in a parasitic wasp (if I'm correctly remembering this) from Florida that only attacked that species, and is what kept it under control in Florida.

It completely failed in California. It was only years later that anyone figured out why. It turned out that the pest species was actually two very closely related species. So closely related that no one had realized there were two species. And the parasite wasp species was also actually two very closely related species, which was also not known at the time. The two parasite wasp species each only attacked one of the pest species. It turned out the invaders were all from one of the two pest species, and the wasps they captured and brought to California all were from the species that wanted the other pest species.

No one knew about these subspecies before because there were only two entomologists in the whole US who specialized in parasitic wasps. There are many thousands of parasitic wasp species in the US, and neither of those researchers had ever looked closely at these particular ones.

peteradio• 3 years ago

It's pretty much impossible to manage as long as we keep unloading global freight.

bell-cot3• 3 years ago

Complaint, Journalism: There seems to be an endless supply of "Yet Another Tick Menace!" news stories. But none of those stories ever seem to mention what natural predators ticks might have.

wiz21c2• 3 years ago

to mention what natural predators ticks might have.

Lazy to duckduckgo it: What are those predators ?

sva_• 3 years ago

It is often said that having chicken in the garden will decrease the tick population in that area. I personally am not convinced that this is due to the chicken eating them though - it is more likely due to the fact that the garden will be fenced keeping wild animals away (who spread them.) Chicken are also very territorial, so that adds to it.

mpreda• 3 years ago

Guineafowl : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guineafowl

bell-cot3• 3 years ago

True, in one sense.

My main objection is to the tone. Especially in this story - which alludes to the new ticks draining entire cows of their blood. Yet fails to mention "DEET can be pretty effective" or "check your skin after spending time outdoors" basics. It's hardly specific to this article, or to this topic - but there's a "you are helpless" tone to a great deal of modern journalism. It's almost as if they wanted everyone cowering in fear inside their houses, and spending all of their time clicking on yet more articles on the web...

darkerside2• 3 years ago

Opossums are one

setgree3• 3 years ago

Opossums, frogs, many types of birds, spiders, ants and beetles, to name a few: https://doi.org/10.1603/0022-2585-38.1.1

Some of those creatures are facing substantial habitat loss in the US, and some are not. I am not an ecologist, but I think the bulk of the problem is probably a few steps up on the food chain. We have basically extirpated the predators (wolves, coyotes, foxes) who prey on the animals (mice, deer, other rodents) who spread ticks in many urban and suburban environments.

CharlieDigital• 3 years ago

    but I think the bulk of the problem is probably a few steps up on the food chain.

My understanding is that climate change is possibly a bigger factor. The ever warmer winters means that less of the eggs die off in sub-freezing weather. More of the early life cycle hosts (e.g. small mammals like mice, rats, voles) survive the winter.

ericbarrett• 3 years ago

Opossums

Sadly, opossums eating ticks is likely a myth, or at least incorrect extrapolation from lab captivity stress: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S18779...

kjkjadksj• 3 years ago

Coyote at least has urbanized in southern california. Huge packs roam neighborhoods every night. Plenty of ample food from scavenging and live prey. No predators. No human hunting or seemingly any state sponsored culling.

melagonster2• 3 years ago

It is possible that there are no natural predators in current environment because they are invade species.

giantg22• 3 years ago

"because they congregate in the thousands and can drain an entire animal of blood."

I didn't think the blood loss was what kills. I thought it was a reaction to all the bites/saliva/pathogens.

dirtyhippiefree5• 3 years ago

What if the hide is carpeted in ticks.

This is the first tick species in America that can reproduce •without• pesky Needing to Find a Mate.

SkyPuncher2• 3 years ago

Sure, but that can already happen. It simply doesn’t.

giantg22• 3 years ago

With regular ticks, it's possible that longterm high rates of exposure causes anemia or heath issues from pathogens. I've simply never heard them cite blood loss from ticks as the acute reason. Supposedly a cow can loose 3L of blood at a time and ticks average about .5mL per feeding. So you'd need 6k fully engorged ticks to loose that much blood to cause problems, and more to actually kill them. I would think most farmers would notice something like that pretty quickly.

strangesmells064• 3 years ago

This article makes it sound like the entire country is about to be infested by these ticks and they will kill all of the livestock and give everyone tickborn diseases.

However these tics have been around since 2017 so I'm assuming there's some limitation that isn't mentioned in the article that has stopped them from taking over.

pluc• 3 years ago

They just didn't have the proper marketing

arbuge• 3 years ago

If they've been here only 7 years and are now found in states from Ohio to Connecticut (mentioned specifically in the article), I'd say the taking over is going pretty well for them.

That doesn't mean they won't hit some natural limitation on their range at some point but it's not obvious to me they're there yet.

onetimeuse923042• 3 years ago

You are probably mistaking ticks with viruses. Ticks are not viruses. Ticks have to travel from places to places and then spend a long time in one place to multiply and establish a colony. Ticks themselves do not fly, they need to be carried by the host animal. It takes time for them to travel long distances especially when the host is a farm animal that can't roam freely long distances. And even once they travel somewhere, it would probably take couple of seasons to spread locally and establish large numbers.

So I see no logical contradiction by saying "these ticks have been around since 2017" and "entire country is about to be infested".

The old math question asks, "Duckweed is spreading on a lake. It takes 1 year to double the area of duckweed. From start to end, it took 15 years to cover entire lake. Which year the duckweed covers half of the lake?"

Exponential growth has this feature that for a long time it seems fine and then suddenly it is over as it overload's the physical capacity to handle it.

And I would say 7 years to get to the current state is extremely fast rate and definitely cause for alarm in my opinion.

strangesmells064• 3 years ago

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.

bobmaxup• 3 years ago

give everyone tickborn diseases.

From the article:

Though Asian longhorned ticks can carry diseases that infect humans, they are not yet considered a threat to human health in the U.S., per the statement.

dirtyhippiefree5• 3 years ago

Having livestock drained of blood is the threat to human health.

We need to eat.

heikkilevanto• 3 years ago

Misread the title as some kind of Tik-Tok chat that can clone itself and is spreading.

pvaldes• 3 years ago

Predators or diseases. Choose one

An Invasive Tick That Can Clone Itself Is Spreading Across the U.S.

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