(WKYT) – Ticks cause their fair share of issues in Kentucky, including Alpha-gal syndrome. Studying ticks can be difficult, but a different type of pest is making it easier.
Using mice to study ticks
Hannah Tiffin is an Assistant Extension Professor of Veterinary Entomology at the University of Kentucky. Tiffin is the Principal Investigator on a project that is using wild mice to study ticks.
“We have a lot of different tick species here, and there’s a lot of changes that are happening in our tick species,” explained Tiffin. “Mice can move around a lot of ticks, and mice are a generalist species. They’re in wild habitats. They’re in habitats near people, near livestock, and different animals. They also host a bunch of different pathogens that can cause issues for people and animals. So the ticks can pick those up from the mice and then transmit them to people or animals.”
Tiffin has been studying ticks and mice for around ten years and started working at UK in 2024.
“Last summer, I was working with different colleagues at North Farm as well as here at Woodford Farm or Sea Oren Little Farm to look at ticks on our horses and on our cattle,” said Tiffin. “The mouse part of the equation came in this summer because it does take a lot of resources to get that part going.”
Not your average mouse traps
Ashley Russo is a second-year Master’s student in the Biting, Insect, and Tick Ecology Lab. She says her day-to-day activities in the lab can vary, as there are many different components to the study.
“One of the main things that we’re doing is mousetrapping to look at the ticks on the mice. What that kind of looks like is it’s about a week long, four to five days, where we set out these Sherman traps at night within two hours of dusk,” explained Russo. “We’ll bait them with peanut butter, potato, and cotton, and we’ll come and pick those traps up in the morning – so pretty early, within two hours of dawn.”
The traps are then checked for mice. Any mouse found in a trap is processed – researchers take blood, ear tissue, and fecal samples and then collect any ticks off it.
“Other times we’ll be sampling ticks off of cattle, off of horses, tick dragging, which is dragging like a large white cloth across any vegetation,” said Russo. “And then we have our new kind of more novel tick surveillance tool.”
“We are investigating kind of a newer method to see if we can also get ticks from the mouse nesting environments rather than going out and sampling the mice themselves, which requires a lot of work and effort and time,” said Tiffin. “If we can put these little boxes out there and get the ticks that fall off of the mice in the boxes and get tick information that way.”
The new tool involves a foot-long PVC pipe with sticky traps on the bottom to catch any ticks that fall off mice passing through. This was inspired by research that was done in Maryland.
Importance of study
Collecting data on ticks found on mice can help fill a gap in information in Kentucky. Similar studies have been done in other states.
“It’s really neat to be able to see all those different interactions and kind of see it play out in a natural environment and see where those ticks are, what species we’re dealing with, and then sending it out to our collaborators to get that pathogen information as well,” said Tiffin. “We want to see what is actually in our tick population and what’s being moved around.”
The research is also important to help inform producers in the area.
“That’s a driving factor for me – to know kind of what ticks they have in their environments that can impact their animals, which impacts their livelihoods, can also impact their own health and safety,” said Russo.