This week Science magazine reported that black-legged ticks infected with the Lyme disease-causing microbe thrive in below-freezing weather and can be active even in winter, according to a study presented at the annual meeting of the Society of Integrative and Comparative Biology by Laura Ferguson, an ecoimmunologist at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, Canada.
Science goes on to describe the study: “Over three winters, she and graduate student Amal El Nabbout collected 600 black-legged ticks from the wild and placed each one in a covered vial with leaf litter at the bottom. The researchers left the vials out for the winter, where temperatures ranged from –18°C to 20°C. Four months later, they tallied which ticks survived and identified which of them carried B. burgdorferi. About 79% of infected ticks survived the cold, whereas only 50% of uninfected ticks did, Ferguson reported this week.”
This suggests that the warmer winters, driven by climate change, may fuel the spread of Lyme-infected ticks northwards.
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