Did you know that dog ticks can live for up to two years without a host?
You can consider this fact depressing or inspiring. Or perhaps both. Depressing, because those little buggers can live a long long time without a good feed. Inspiring, in terms of the myriad methods earth’s creatures can develop in order to survive.
How do I know this factoid about dog ticks? Well, I looked it up:
Some sources say ticks can live for 24 hours or one full day without a host, while others say they can live for up to two years without food. The truth is, both could be right, but it depends on the conditions, species of tick and the stage of their lifecycle. …
The American dog tick can survive for even longer than deer ticks! Unfed larvae are able to survive for up to 540 days, while unfed nymphs have been recorded to survive for up to 584 days! Even more impressive, unfed adult American dog ticks can go 2-3 years (up to 1,053 days) without food!
Impressive indeed.
Why was I researching this? A friend of mine hosted a dog tick, and although I didn’t know it was a dog tick I took a photo and looked it up. The strange thing is that this friend hadn’t been outside (or around any dogs) for days.
The good news is that, at least in this part of the world, dog ticks don’t transmit disease compared to deer ticks, which can.
One o’possum will eat up to 5000 ticks/year.
I didn’t know that, but I’m not surprised. My border collie is a tick magnet who picks up ticks just about every time we go outside. We’re constantly pulling ticks off of her. Some times I get them from her, in my hair.
Cheap pet ticks? Nope!
I used to think opossums were vermin, and would shoot them, but I’ll spare anything that will eat ticks. Guinea fowl (we called them “Guinea hens” on the farm) also eat a lot of ticks. And bats eat mosquitoes.
. . . and mares eat oats and . . .
Having spent a lot of time outside in the woods or unmowed fields, I have been attacked numerous times by ticks in my life, but thankfully, no disease yet that I know of.
They aren’t disease carriers. Deer Ticks, on the other hand. . . .
“.. does eat oats, and little lambs eat ivy.”
A diet I always regarded as very strange, until I saw the actual lyrics in an old piece of sheet music from my aged aunt.
The real words are even stranger.
I walked out on my porch yesterday and there were several ticks on the columns and floor. Where did they come from?
All I can think is yuck.
I have seen about two ticks in 50 years. No ticks, no fleas, and no drugs needed for my baby.
On the other hand a cougar walked through the yard a couple nights ago. I always tell my girl when she needs to go out at night to not get eaten. She announces herself in a “if I find you in my yard I’m gonna kill you” way. But it is all bluff.
More news from my town
https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/watch-tiktok-video-woman-digging-223256954.html?
See this:
That crazy idea (worlds as atoms in a bigger world) spawned a microgenre of science fiction stories, notably “He Who Shrank” by Henry Hasse.
https://archive.org/details/Amazing_Stories_v10n11_1936-08/page/n14/mode/1up
W.B. Yeats: “To A Poet, Who Would Have Me Praise Certain Bad Poets, Imitators Of His And Mine”
Is that what they call doggerel?
@neo: De Morgan’s A Budget of Paradoxes (1872)
BTW that’s Augustus De Morgan, the same De Morgan responsible for De Morgan’s Laws:
________________________________
not (A or B) = (not A) and (not B)
not (A and B) = (not A) or (not B)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Morgan%27s_laws
________________________________
Basic stuff. You can’t go very far into propositional logic or Boolean algebra without De Morgan’s Laws. Also useful for electrical circuits and computer programming.
I was unaware of his literary side. “A Budget of Paradoxes” looks scholarly yet entertaining, weaving between English, Latin and French. Must have been a clever bloke!
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/23100/23100-h/23100-h.htm