Ticks with Special Emphasis on Boophilus Microplus

Abstract

Man, with his domestic animals, has intruded into many complex host-parasite relationships involving ticks. Indeed, with the exception of the form of Ornithodorus porcinus which feeds almost exclusively on man in the Kenya Highlands (Walton 1962), all of man’s and many of his domestic animals’ contacts with ticks are casual in that wildlife are the preferred hosts and the source of the disease organisms which ticks transmit. This interaction creates difficult control problems since it means that the habitat and the wild life hosts must be manipulated if control of the arthropod is to be achieved. In these situations, there are obvious difficulties which are technical, cultural and emotional. Area control by residual insecticides, or any insecticide, will become increasingly unpopular, and the destruction of wildlife will be equally distasteful to a world quite rightly concerned with environmental conservation. The following examples illustrate the problems: (1) In the Ozark region of Oklahoma, U.S.A., recreational areas are flooded with the lone star tick Amblyomma americanum which feeds very readily on man and cattle and many other hosts including the white-tailed deer Odocoileus virginianus (Hair and Howell 1970). Control of this tick will ultimately involve the control of the deer or its habitat, yet deer protection at this stage has led to such vast populations of the lone star tick that the tick itself has become a major mechanism in the regulation of deer populations (Bolte, Hair and Fletcher, 1970).