You don’t need to touch a tick for it find you, a new study suggests. The blood-sucking parasites may be able to catapult themselves from vegetation to their hosts thanks to static electricity.
Mammals, birds and reptiles carry considerable electrostatic charges — equivalent to voltages of hundreds to tens of thousands of volts. And ticks seem to respond to that. Tick nymphs brought close to various objects charged to voltages encountered in nature frequently whoosh across the gap to land on those surfaces, researchers report June 30 in Current Biology.
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