Saturday, May 30, 2009

Ticks

While walking through the brush looking for tracks and sign in eastern Washington, several tick hitchhikers were picked up. I noticed that there appeared to be a couple of different kinds.

I didn't find a site that had what appeared to be exactly the ticks we found, but this site has a picture that makes me think these were dog ticks (Dermacentor sp). Based on this and other sites I saw, I think that the different looking ticks are likely the same species, but different sex.


Female dog tick (scale in mm)




Male dog tick

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

It has been a bad year for ticks here in michigan already! I found at about 6 deer ticks on me in the first week of fishing season. agh..I think out of all insects these creep me out the most....hope you don't have anymore encounters with them...

Jonathan said...

Yeah, they are pretty creepy.

This was probably only the third or fourth outing where I got a tick on me (most of my life has been spent outside of tick country). Getting all those ticks actually made me feel a little bit more comfortable with them. Though that might change if I get one embedded.