The Deer, the Ticks, and the Mites 20100416

(10 am. – promoted by ek hornbeck)

Once there was a deer walking through the break between the woods and the meadow.  As ticks do, they climbed onto tall grasses and attached themselves to the deer as she walked through them.

They do this instinctively, almost like they were directed by some of the radio talk show blowhards.  As the deer walks past, they sense it and fall onto them.  The deer never realize that they are being bitten until the the itch starts.

Ticks have a complex life cycle, and lots of it has to do with sucking the blood out of other creatures.  They are parasites on reptiles, birds, and most especially, mammals, hence the unsuspecting deer.

The deer went on her way, and the ticks grew.  They fed off her blood, and infected her with several tick borne diseases.  She could fight off one or two of them, but the tall grass was full of them, and there were hundreds that found her skin.  Now, ticks go for soft spots, like hair follicles, or other easy to penetrate places.

Ticks are persistent.  The deer had several of them, and all of them had previously feasted on a Fox.  It turns out that a bloodsucker that has been associated with a Fox gets crazy, as that association affects the higher parts of the brain.  There were at least eight or nine of them that had roots in a Fox, and after being exposed to them, the deer’s mind was affected as well.  She decided that the Fox was her friend, and let the Fox eat her fawn.  That was good for the deer, as she saw it, but knew deep in what was left of her mind that it was wrong.

Later in the summer, the Mites came out to feed.  They cared not for the blood of a deer, but fancied the soft parts of ticks.  By the thousands, they started to consume the ticks from the Fox.  They penetrated their soft spots, called in tick language “truth”.  They sucked the soft part out (the only parts, other than a fake shell that ticks have) and digested them, rejecting the poisonous bits.  From a tick from a Fox, that was very poor eating.  But consume them they did.

Before long, the ticks that had eaten from the Fox were starting to drop off and wither.  One had great plans to infect deer from another state, but the Fox’s reach told him to go back home and just fester there.

Before long, the mites, in the millions, had neutralized the ticks from the Fox, and the deer was shed of them, almost.  The deer wondered what had happened, and one of the ticks intimated to her that any tick from a Fox was instructed to bite rabidly and go into the ears to make them hear only selectively.

Then that tick was let go by the Fox, who controlled everything.  No longer could that tick eat, nor speak, except for ONE who adapted and thrived off another host.  More on that one later.  That particular tick turned out be a beneficial insect, more like a bee, cross pollinating knowledge, but only years later.

The mites turned out to be smarter that the ticks from the Fox realized, and the deer recovered after they fell off of her.  Now, the Fox tries to infect new ticks to make the other deer weak, but the deer are smarter now and feel them falling onto her back, and rejects them.

As for the mites, thousands of them keep the ticks from the Fox in check.  It look like the influence of the Fox is waning, but it will take years for that Fox to go away.

The moral of the story is:  a Fox can influence lots of ticks to do its bidding, but thousands or millions of mites can cause the ticks to fall.

Copyright 20100416 by Dr. David W. Smith

Warmest regards,

Doc

Crossposted at Kos