Ticks are coming

With increasing temperatures around the world, ticks begin to feel at ease in more and more regions of the world, and Lyme disease is becoming the first epidemic to emerge from climate change.

Evolution endowed the American hareespecially skillful skill. For a period of about 10 weeks, when the days in the hills and arctic forests are shortened in the autumn, the agile night hare is transformed. From reddish-brown, matching the color of pine needles and tree branches, among which he earns food, he turns into silver-white - just in time for the fall of winter snow. And this transformation is not in vain. Lepus americanus, as he is known to science, is able to jump three meters and run at speeds up to 43 km / h, thanks to powerful hind legs and a fierce desire to survive. But still, according to one study, 86% of hares end their lives in the form of a lynx, fox, coyote, or even goshawk or virginian owl dinner. Changing clothes is a way to stay invisible, hide in the bushes or quietly run across the snow,

White hare is widespread in the cold and highlands of North America - in the wild regions of western Montana, on the coniferous slopes of Alaska and in the inaccessible places of the Canadian Yukon. Yukon is part of Beringia, a vast ancient territory uniting Siberia and North America with an isthmus, after the end of the last ice age 11,000 years ago, giving way to the Bering Strait. For thousands of years, many mammals, plants and insects have moved west and east along this isthmus, creating a rich Arctic forest. But this unchanging cold area north of the 60th parallel, with early snow and hard ice tapes, changed, by geological standards, in no time. Over the past half century, the average temperature has risen by 2 ° there, while in winter it is warmer by 4 °. The glaciers retreat quickly, releasing streams of ancient water into Lake Clwain , a 400 km ² water basin, which is called the pearl of the Yukon. Thunderstorms, ice jams, forest fires and rains suddenly began to occur there much more often. Permafrost disappears.

Such rapid changes in vast areas of the northern territories test the adaptive capabilities of the white hare, no matter how agile and nimble it is. Snow falls later, melts earlier, but the hare's skin changes according to a long-established schedule - and sometimes the hare turns out to be snowy white, while its environment is still brown. Because of this, it becomes easier prey for predators. In 2016, wildlife biologists who tracked hares in the wilderness of Montana called this phenomenon “camouflage mismatch caused by climate change.” Hares molt, as always. It just doesn’t snow. And their survival rate fell by 7%.

To outwit their new enemy - warm winters, hares will need something like a miracle, which the biologists who wrote an article for Ecology Letters magazine called "evolutionary salvation." As in the Yukon, it is expected that there will be less and less snow in the investigated corner of Montana; it is possible that by the middle of the century the forest will remain uncovered with snow for a whole extra month, and without snow, hare-hares will stand out from the forest no worse than white balloons.

The list of animals that will have to adapt or die should be recorded and moose. The awkward king of the deer family, known for its horns that look like giant outstretched fingers, can reach two meters in scope, faces a whole list of threats to existence - from wolves and bears to cysticercosis andhepatic flukes . But in the late 1990s, in many northern states of the United States and Canada, a new attack began to mow moose, moose and moose.

Lee Canthar is a moose-based biologist and specialist in Maine, which means he earns a living by wading through hard-to-reach spots in the northern and central parts of the state when a GPS collar reports the death of another moose. A skinny man with a conspicuous graying mustache, in a flannel shirt and jeans, Kantar supplied collars with 60 moose in January 2014 in the area of Mushed Lake[Moosehead Lake - Moosehead Lake / approx. trans.] in a mountainous area in the west of central Maine. By the end of that year, 12 adult moose and 22 calf died - 57% of the entire group. When biologists examined their remains, they discovered the cause of death. On the corpses of moose calves, who were not even a year old, there were up to 60,000 blood-sucking arthropods, known as a winter tick . In Vermont, up to 100,000 ticks could be found on every dead moose. In New Hampshire, the elk population fell from 7,500 to 4,500 between 1990 and 2014, and similarly abundant tick populations could be found on depleted animal corpses. Of these magnificent animals literally drank all the blood.


Losih - “ghost” with a noticeable loss of wool in New Hampshire

Winter ticks have been attacking moose since the end of the 19th century. In a typical year, an elk can carry from 1,000 to 20,000 ticks. In the most severe winter, when moose are malnourished and weakened, anemia and hypothermia, intensified by the influence of ticks, can tip the scales in favor of death. Bill Samuel, a retired biology professor at the University of Alberta, spent his entire career studying moose in North America. Once he meticulously calculated the number of ticks on a moose found in Alberta in 1988 - 149,916. In a 2004 book, he recalls how ticks killed moose in Saskatchewan in the spring of 1916, in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick in the 1930s, at the National Losiny Ostrov Park in central Alberta from 1940 to 1990. Some of the animals were so hit by mites that there was not a single empty spot on arthropods' favorite places - on the anus, in the inguinal region, on the sternum, withers and shoulders. In futile attempts to get rid of parasites, poor animals rubbed against trees, which led to the loss of fur and left gray spots on the skin. Such animals are called "ghost moose."

Elks have long perished from diseases, predators, hunting, and sometimes from ticks. But their losses in the 21st century have other, more menacing, bearing more consequences results. In 2015, two environmental organizations wrote a petition to the U.S. Secretary of the Interior asking the Midwest moose to be considered an endangered species. In Minnesota, the number of moose over the previous decade fell by 58%, approximately the same decrease is observed in New England. Environmental experts believe that by 2020, in the Midwest, moose could disappear altogether.

Kantar knew that ticks were killing his moose in Maine. It became clear why winter ticks hit his flock, and drank almost half of the blood, sucking on any available scrap of skin. “The greatest threat to this species,” the nonprofit center for biological diversity and respect for the Earth announced in its 2015 petition, “is climate change.”

Not hunters, not loss of habitats, or even environmental pollution - although this is also important. Moose love the cold and need it. They become lethargic in the heat, cannot eat properly, become weak and vulnerable. During warmer and shorter winters in the Midwestern and Northeastern United States, huge numbers of winter ticks survive when they wake up when the trees come to life earlier in the spring, and they have more time to climb tall bushes, stretch their legs and wait for an unsuspecting and unprepared elk to meet with them. When moose lie in the snow, they leave stains of blood from swollen ticks. When a calf is born in Minnesota, a crowd of hungry ticks moves from mother to newborn. Moose dump these thick mites in large quantities onto the ground in autumn and winter, and mites, instead of

Samuel is a neat scientist, not inclined to draw hasty conclusions, and he notices how many factors work together to eradicate moose in a complex wildlife ecosystem. Wolves, liver flukes, cysticercosis, uncontrolled hunting, loss of places to live - all this adds up to the big picture. Because of the influence and exposure to other factors, “Climate change,” he told me, “may be the main one.”

The problem is ticks

Jill Auerbach knew that winter ticks, sucking on dead and dying moose, do not pose a threat to people whom they practically do not bite. But when she heard the news about how moose are losing half their blood due to ticks, she was horrified. Auerbach, an active woman over the age of 70, was bitten about 30 years ago by a tick spread in forests and thickets in the region where she lives - in the Hudson Valley of New York State. Due to this tick, she lost 10 years of life, she had to resign from the position of a highly skilled programmer from a nearby IBM unit, and she still suffers from the consequences of Lyme disease, which was discovered too late. “She knocked me down,” says Auerbach, who is a fairly large group of people who have Lyme disease and suffer from its long-term symptoms.black-footed ticks , one of which bit her 30 years ago.

This last tick is known to scientists as a representative of the ixodidae family - in its case it was Ixodes scapularis, a black-footed tick. They spread throughout the United States and other countries with incredible agility. Canada, Britain, Germany, Scandinavia, Inner Mongolia in China, Tula and Moscow regions in Russia: they all face a huge and ever-increasing number of tick-borne diseases. Infected ticks are found in the parks of London, Chicago and Washington, DC, and in the green spaces of Killarney National Parkin the southwest of Ireland. In Western Europe, there are no reporting standards for tick counts, and the official number is approximately 85,000 per year. An analysis from 2016 published in the British journal Journal of Public Health in Oxford shows 232,000. Signs of a growing problem are seen in Japan, Turkey and South Korea, where the number of cases of Lyme disease increased from zero in 2010 to 2000 in 2016. When I asked three Spanish doctors in 2017 where Lyme disease can be found in Spain, one said “everywhere,” and the rest agreed with him. One of them, Abel Saldarreaga Marine, treated forest service workers in Andalusia, where, he said, symptoms are usually treated with traditional methods. In the Netherlands, as elsewhere, warnings are designed to protect local hikers, children and gardeners from being bitten,a dog tick lives there in 54% of the territory.

And on the other side of the Atlantic, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta updates maps every year that show black cases of Lyme disease in the US counties. For the first time such a card was officially released in 1996, although even then this disease was quite widespread. The dots on this map form a permanent black spot that stretches along the Atlantic coast, from Delaware to Cape Cod, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and to the lower borders of New York State - where Auerbach caught the disease. A blurred shadow also runs along the border between Wisconsin and Minnesota, in addition, many points are also found in the middle states. But it’s the change in these cards over the course of 18 years that shows the heyday of Lyme disease in the manner of notebooks with animation,

In 1996, black-footed ticks settled - that is, there were enough of them to maintain the population - in 396 US districts. By 2015, researchers found that they had already settled in 842 districts - that is, 113% more. It is noteworthy that the changes on the tick distribution map from 1996 to 2015 practically coincide with the distribution map of Lyme disease.

Auerbach, who has become an environmental activist, with deep knowledge about the problems of this disease, for years ended her letters with the passage: “What is the problem? In ticks, of course! ” She believes that they need to be stopped, and a map from 2015 shows why. It shows how ticks move to places that were considered unsuitable for habitation only 10 years ago - from the Allegany Mountainsto the Mississippi Valley, from western Pennsylvania to the south and east, through the states of Kentucky and Tennessee. In Minnesota and Wisconsin, I. scapularis “seems to have expanded its range in all directions,” as the CDC researchers wrote, and these words are noteworthy and alarming. Ticks "spread into the mainland from the Atlantic coast and went both north and south," they write, not spreading only to the east, where the Atlantic Ocean is located.

Lyme disease appeared on the Connecticut coast in the 1970s, when symptoms similar to rheumatoid arthritis were seen in a group of children who had the misfortune of being pioneers in a disease whose treatment would turn out to be early treatment. Late diagnoses can be characterized by long and complex symptoms - fatigue, joint pain, learning problems, distraction, and depression. Parents and counselors for treating children who had the disease, as well as children who grew up to the age of 20, told me about the lost school years. Most of all, per capita cases of infection were detected in children from 5 to 9 years old, and most often people aged 60 to 64 years go to the hospital, according to a study of 150 million US insurance records made from 2005 to 2010.

The history of Lyme disease in our time, its spread over dozens of countries around the world and about millions of cases, must be told in the future of a modern community living in a changed environment. Over the past quarter of the 20th century, the delicate set of natural forces has been disrupted, and has transformed Lyme disease from an organism that has been quietly living for thousands of years into what we have today: a set of terrible stories shared by mothers; difficulties for doctors who lack good tests and a clear line of research; a hate object for research that rejects the persistence of infection, but confirms the presence of unpleasant effects.

CDC does not use the word “epidemic” to describe Lyme disease. He prefers " endemic", that is," the constant presence and / or widespread prevalence of a disease or pediatric disease in a particular locality. "But Lyme disease was not widespread before, and in general it was not in principle before. Also, it is not limited by any boundaries. Linguistic CDC is unsuccessful and minimizes the importance of the disease, which affects 300,000 to 400,000 people in the United States every year, is found in at least 30 countries, and possibly in much more countries, and is rampant around the world. Lyme moves, breaks outside, apply directly as an epidemic.

Ticks carrying Lyme disease are not insects, but arachnids. They do not know how to fly and jump, but we can say that they climb mountains, cross rivers, travel hundreds and thousands of kilometers to new habitats. All this is documented by scientists looking for ingenious ways to track and count ticks. They drag white flannel fabric over fallen leafy forest land, sometimes blowing them carbon dioxide, which causes ticks to stretch their forelimbs in an attempt to grab onto a passing lunch. They catch migratory birds infected by arachnid hitchhikers. They count the number of ticks on the ears of mice and shrews caught, during which they are sometimes subjected to bites. They dissect bird nests, open a carpet of fallen leaves, sift grass-covered sand dunes.

When researchers are lucky, they find data from other eras confirming their sense of change. In 1956, the Bosnian scientist Tsvetanovich from Yugoslavia reported that I. Ricinus is not able to survive at an altitude of more than 800 m above sea level. But when Jasmine Omeragic from Sarajevo University took a new dimension in 2004, collecting 7085 dog ticks in the Dinar Highlands in Bosnia and Herzegovina, he found that ticks were already comfortable at altitudes up to 1190 m. In 1957 in Šumava, which was then located in Czechoslovakia, researchers concluded that ticks are unable to inhabit at altitudes of more than 700 m above sea level. By 2001, biologists had already discovered them at altitudes of 1100 m. These are early observations, which, according to Jolyon Medlock, a medical entomologist at the British Ministry of Health and his colleagues, "Are clear evidence of the altitudinal distribution of I. ricinus." That is, ticks aggressively move up. But they are moving in other directions - and in those places that are better suited for humans than the steep slopes of the mountains.

In the Hudson Valley, a team from the University of Pennsylvania used Ixodes DNA to build a family of black-footed ticks — something like people used saliva swabs to look for distant relatives in the genetic code. Examining ticks collected in four places from 2004 to 2009, researchers recreated a pattern of their migration up the river for 200 km. The tree begins its story in south Yorktown, where, as tests show, ticks have lived for the past 57 years. Then, after 17 years, these eight-legged pioneers climbed the next step, reaching Pleasant Valley. 11 years later, they settled in Greenville, at the foot of the Catskill Mountain Range., and after 17 years appeared in the north of Gilderland, where in 1639 immigrants from the Netherlands appeared. Although other strains were constantly interwoven with DNA, the one that came from the south of Yorktown always remained dominant. Data on DNA, the researchers write, “clearly supports the theory of propagation from south to north.” Against all odds, ticks migrate to places where it has always been colder and more snow. And they feel great.

In Europe, mites likewise tirelessly march north. In Sweden, researchers studied the development of canine tick populations from 1994 to 1996, dragging tissue at 57 sites and interviewing local residents about tick bites and findings. They established a penetration boundary at a latitude of about 60 ° 5′N, above which ticks did not survive. By 2008, ticks had already begun to be found 500 km to the north, along the Baltic coast, to about 66 ° N N The same thing happened in Norway.

Periodic observations from 1943 to 1983 showed that ticks did not survive north of 66 ° N By 2011, they had already passed 400 km, to the northernmost latitudes in Europe, to 69 ° N. About this record, which, apparently, is destined to fall, researchers from Oslo reported. Nicholas Ogden, a senior researcher at the Department of Health’s National Microbiology Laboratory of Canada, has watched the last two decades as black-footed ticks crossed the U.S. border on their way up and dived 1,000 km into Canada. In 1990, the only documented tick spot in Canada was located in southern Ontario, in Long Point, a land area protruding into Lake Erie and much closer to New York than to Ottawa, Toronto or Montreal.

In 2008, Ogden and colleagues identified the risks of ticks moving north and predicted a “possible large-scale spread” to southern central Canada. In 2015, in another study, this prediction was expanded: ticks carrying Lyme disease will move 250-500 km towards the pole by 2050. Canada is in the same place that the United States was in the 1980s, and Ogden is aware of this. The second largest country in the world, having seen a 12-fold increase in Lyme disease cases from 2009 to 2013, faces a full-blown epidemic. “This is becoming a real health problem,” he told me.

In 2015, Ogden and colleagues used a new way to track the movement of ticks through bird migration. A small short-billed blackbird appears on the scene.- a dim, medium-sized bird, very secretive, which hides in the undergrowth, because of which it often collects ticks on itself. The Ogden team caught 72 of these birds as they crossed the Canadian border along a migration route to the north. The researchers then studied the molecular structure of their fragile metallic gray tail feathers. These tail feathers, helping the bird to change the direction of flight, carry a certain imprint, hydrogen isotopes from the water of the region where the bird fledged. Knowing that birds usually return to where they grew up, scientists have concluded that birds can help explore large areas extending from northern Ontario to southern Arctic Canada. Charles Francis, a bird tracer for the Canadian Wildlife Service, assisted in this study.

“It is very likely that ticks constantly fell into the northern territories due to bird migration,” he said. It’s just that today in more places more ticks they survive survive. By 2017, Canadian researchers reported that fairly large tracts of Ontario had transformed, as the work for Remote Sensing magazine wrote, from “unsuitable to liveable” ticks carrying Lyme disease. While white hares are struggling to survive in Montana, ticks and their pathogens thrive in a warming world, colonize more places and breed there, just like they did during the warming after the last ice age. 30 years ago, doctors in Canada told sick people that they almost certainly caught this disease somewhere else, most likely when traveling around the United States.

In 2014, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued a 112-page report on the future of the United States in a warming world. It begins with a conclusion that has been rejected, politicized and ignored in the United States for decades, and finally, at least for the time being, they decided to accept:

The climate of the Earth is changing. Temperatures are rising, the patterns of snow and rainfall are changing, more and more extreme climatic events occur - heavy rains and record high temperatures. Scientists are pretty sure that many of these events can be attributed to rising levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in our atmosphere caused by human activities.

The report consists of six sections trying to describe and quantify the impact of global climate change - on the oceans, glaciers, forests, lakes and people. In the third edition of the 2014 report, the agency included four new indicators to help monitor and measure the impact of climate change. Among them are the amount of energy used for cooling and heating (it can be seen that it takes more energy to cool), the number of forest fires, water and temperature levels in the Great Lakes, and the spread of Lyme disease.

From now on, the EPA will track the number of cases of Lyme disease in the United States as an official measure of climate change. This tick-borne disease, which killed 4 million people in the United States since the 1990s, was the only disease to receive this dubious honor. The agency, discussing the effects of warming on health, mentions two other trends that need to be monitored: heat-related deaths estimated at 80,000 over the past thirty years, and ragweed bloom seasons, which pollen causes allergies in millions of people. But Lyme disease has an important difference. It is spread by ticks, whose “population is influenced by many factors, including climate,” as the EPA writes in the report.

In the states from Maine to Florida, from New York to California, throughout southern Canada and in many parts of Europe, once the vast expanses are diminishing, dividing, turning into idealized forest parks on the periphery of roads - into places where people can spend time in nature and support her. Many live, work and play next to these green spaces in a new era called the Anthropocene, in an era marked by human influence. The irony is that these mutated bits of nature are incubators of Lyme disease. The smaller the bite, the greater the proportion of infected ticks on it, as noted in a study in Dutchess County, New York, where the number of Lyme cases per capita is on the first line in the world ranking.

In these natural areas, small mammals, for example,the white-footed mice of North America and garden dormouse of Europe find refuge, flourishing in the absence of predators such as foxes. In the language of tick-borne diseases, mice become hosts of ticks and reservoirs for Lyme disease, a place where newborn ticks, so small that they are hard to see with the eye, get their first portion of the infection. In city parks, suburban highways and forest parks, people come into contact with these ticks. In many studies, other factors besides climate change turn out to be factors fueling the epidemic, many of which also depend on people. Cutting forests into small areas and loss of biodiversity are clearly in the first places of this list.

But although there is no single explanation for the occurrence of Lyme disease in the 20th century, there is ample evidence that climate change has played a significant role in this. On the Pinkam Notch Pass in the northern foothills of the Appalachian Mountains in New Hampshire, snow cover has been decreasing by an average of 1 cm every year since 1970, and the number of days with temperatures below zero has dropped by three days in ten years since 1960. In New Hampshire, lilacs are blooming earlier - and in this state there are still large areas untouched by people, whose population is just over 1 million, and plant growth seasons lasted 2-3 weeks. New Hampshire ranks second in the number of cases of Lyme disease in the United States in 2013, immediately after neighboring Vermont.

In the Krkonoše Mountains in northern Bohemia, temperatures rose by 1.4 ° C over four decades, and I. ricinus survive at an altitude of 1300 m above sea level. “It's not that they decide to go climbing,” Michael Kotsifakis from the University of South Bohemia told me. “They can simply survive in these areas.” In the Monteregie area in the south of Quebec, stretching south from Montreal to the St. Lawrence River, temperatures have risen 0.8 ° since the 1970s, and white-footed mice thrive during a shorter and warmer winter. “The habitat is fast moving toward the pole,” Canadian researchers wrote in 2013, pointing to “increased evidence supporting the hypothesis that climate warming is a key cause of Lyme disease, which works at many levels of the disease transmission cycle.”

The following questions arise: has the epidemic caused climate change? Or is change simply fueling this disease by promoting ticks and animals, their owners, to new places and new people? Evidence speaks of the latter. The first is harder to confirm. But Lyme disease was the first disease to appear in North America, Europe and China during the era of climate change, the first to take root, spread widely and affect different groups of people. It also grows in places like Australia, where residents are also told that they have some other disease, or that they got an infection elsewhere. “We are on an island, and we think in island terms,” said Trevor Cini, a general practitioner on the north coast of New South Wales, who is regularly diagnosed with Lyme disease, although doctors say it does not exist in Australia.

Incorrect diagnoses cost many patients with Lyme disease the precious time needed to find a cure. Medical experts make a mistake in believing that in the future everything will be as it was in the past. Lyme disease is moving to new places, as it has been doing for the past 50 years. In the decades that have passed since infecting children in Lyme, Connecticut, little progress has been made in areas such as controlling tick distribution, protecting people from bites, accurate screening for the Lyme pathogen, Borrelia burgdorferi, and particularly appropriate treatment for those affected. Ixodes mites - black-footed, canine, or some others - deserve our respect. They are armed not only with Lyme disease, but also with a growing array of microbes; bacteria, viruses and parasites, known and still undiscovered. Sometimes ticks can infect one or more bites with three or four diseases. They are so dexterous that two ticks that feed side by side on the same animal can transmit pathogens to each other without infecting the host. The Lyme pathogen is so cunning that mites infected by it find the victim more efficiently than uninfected ones. These ticks cannot fly, jump, or track the victim for more than a couple of human steps. But they changed many lives, cost billions of dollars in medical expenses, and brought fear to walks in the woods or to play children in the grass — in our relationship with nature. than uninfected. These ticks cannot fly, jump, or track the victim for more than a couple of human steps. But they changed many lives, cost billions of dollars in medical expenses, and brought fear to walks in the woods or to play children in the grass — in our relationship with nature. than uninfected. These ticks cannot fly, jump, or track the victim for more than a couple of human steps. But they changed many lives, cost billions of dollars in medical expenses, and brought fear to walks in the woods or to play children in the grass — in our relationship with nature.

And all this is even more unpleasant when we realize that it was we who became the cause of this.