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By Nancy C. Hinkle
University of Georgia
Avoiding ticks outdoors is challenging. Around your home, though,
you can maintain your lawn to be inhospitable to them. Hot,
drying sunshine is deadly to ticks. Keeping your lawn closely
mowed will reduce their numbers.
Spraying the yard with an insecticide often makes the problem
worse. Insecticides kill predatory insects that help keep tick
numbers down.
If you want to apply an pesticide to your pet, check the product
label to make sure it kills ticks. Compounds registered for fleas
aren’t always effective against ticks.
Ticks are found mainly on low-growing plants along paths and
trails, waiting to snare a passing host by hooking their legs
into an animal’s leg hair or a human’s pants cuff.
Haven for ticks
Avoid tall grass and brushy or weedy areas as much as possible.
Walk in the middle of trails to avoid brushing against
surrounding vegetation. And don’t sit down on the ground.
Protecting yourself from ticks includes wearing clothing that
limits their access to your skin, applying appropriate repellents
and performing daily tick checks.
Wear long pants where ticks are around and tuck your cuffs into
socks to keep them from crawling under the pant leg. For the best
protection, tape the top of your socks over your pant legs, then
twist the tape and make one wrap with the sticky side out to trap
ticks. It’s easier to spot ticks on light-colored clothes.
Be careful
You can apply products containing DEET to your skin. (But follow
label instructions. Pay particular attention to cautions for
children.)
Apply products such as Permanone, which contain permethrin, to
clothes but not to skin. Spray these products on your clothes and
allow them to dry overnight before you put them on. Permethrin
will kill both ticks and mosquitoes that land on treated clothing.
A tick takes a day or two to secrete a feeding tube before it can
begin to suck blood. So daily tick checks can keep them from
feeding and transmitting diseases. Look and feel for ticks
carefully, especially in hair-covered places.
Examine Fido
Check your pets after they’ve been outside, too. Destroying ticks
before they can feed not only protects pets from diseases but
reduces tick reproduction.
To remove a tick, use tweezers, grasping the tick as close to the
skin as you can. Pull slowly and firmly, without twisting or
crushing the tick.
A tick is like a balloon attached to a hypodermic needle.
Squeezing its body forces material through its mouthparts into
your bloodstream, increasing the risk of infection.
It’s a good idea to keep the tick in a plastic bag in the
refrigerator for a few weeks. If the person bitten later develops
symptoms of a tick-transmitted disease, it can be tested to
determine the causative agent.
Vigilance
Be especially watchful for the first two weeks after a tick bite.
If flu-like symptoms, headache, fever, lack of balance, skin
rashes, muscle or joint pain or nausea develop, see a doctor.
The most common tick in Georgia is the lone star tick (the female
has a white dot on the middle of her back). American dog ticks
are common and can transmit Rocky Mountain spotted fever and
tularemia. Black-legged ticks, or deer ticks, carry Lyme disease.
Of the dozens of tick species in Georgia, the brown dog tick is
the most troublesome household pest. It doesn’t attack humans.
But it does transmit some canine diseases.
The six-legged seed tick attaches to a dog and becomes
bluish-gray, engorged with blood. It molts and becomes a larger,
eight-legged, reddish-brown nymph. After engorging with blood
again the nymph, now dark gray, molts and becomes a reddish-brown
adult.
When it engorges yet again on the dog’s blood, it’s bluish and
about a third of an inch long. The adult female lays 1,000 to
3,000 eggs.
(Nancy Hinkle is an Extension Service entomologist with the
University of Georgia College of Agricultural and Environmental
Sciences.)
