“This has been one of the worst springs for moose calves that I’ve ever seen,” said Lee Kanter, a moose biologist at the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife. Over the winter, 60 of the 70 moose calves that his team were tracking died.
The killers were winter ticks (Dermacentor albipictus), a species that feeds primarily on elk, caribou, deer, and moose. Up to 90,000 ticks can overwinter on a single moose, and this can result in significant blood loss, since these ticks spend their entire lives feeding on one animal.
While most adult moose can survive these infestations, moose calves often don’t have the fat reserves or tick removal skills to survive the Maine winters and the blood loss.
Kanter believes that a prime driver behind Maine’s tick surge (including dog and blacklegged ticks) is climate change — Maine’s winters are, on average, now two weeks shorter, enabling ticks to live longer and spread farther.
Winter ticks rarely attach to humans, but climate change is having the same effect on human-biting ticks. Kanter says the human biting ticks in Maine carry babesia parasites, the Powassan virus, and a newly discovered, unidentified anaplasma bacterium.
Kanter and his team, proponents of One Health, are working closely with two Maine tick labs and his Canadian counterparts to explore ways to combat their tick problem.
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