Found on Leo the cat, Autumn, 2016, Leinster, Ireland. Lodged in skin below the left ear. Removed by pinching it out with fingers.
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| An engorged common tick - Ireland. Identification: mouth parts, eight legs, adult soft-bodied. (the centre mouth part is called the hypostome; the bit that goes into the skin and anchors the tick to its host) |
(the first attempt to hold the cat down so that we could remove the tick with tweezers was pretty stressful - mainly for the cat who didn't like being kept still while tweezers approached his cheek).
Taxonomy: Worldwide there are over 850 different types of tick. Ticks belong to family Ixodidae, the group of subspecies of suborder Metastigmata, order Anactinotrichidea (= Parasitoformes), Ixodida (= Metastigmata) Acarina of subclass Acari, class Ararchnide, phylum Arthropoda (Encyclopaedia Britannica; CVBD, 2016).
Lifecycle: The tick attaches to its host and has a blood meal after which it detaches. Adult ticks mate on their host. Engorged females drop to the ground from the host, find a site to nest and lay eggs in a batch before dying. Hatched tick larvae start life with six legs (hexapod form). The larvae climb to the tops of nearby grass/plants and wait to hitch onto hosts that pass by, usually mammals. Like the adult form larvae gorge on the host's blood before dropping to the ground and moulting to transform into eight legged nymphs (octapod form). Nymphs repeat a number of cycles of host attachment, blood meal, detaching and moulting before reaching adulthood.
"Soft ticks differ from hard ticks by feeding intermittently, laying several batches of eggs, passing through several nymphal stages, and carrying on their developmental cycles in the home or nest of the host rather than in fields." (Encyclopaedia Britannica).Tick-borne diseases: Ticks damage their hosts by transmitting diseases. Tick-borne diseases include Lyme disease (borreliosis), Rocky Mountain spotted fever, tularemia, ehrlichiosis, reapsing fever, Colorado tick fever, babesiosis, spirochetal relapsing fever, rickettsial infections. Tick-borne diseases in Australia include "spotted fever group rickettsiae (Queensland tick typhus and Flinders Island spotted fever) and Q fever." (Lowbridge et al, 2011)
Hard ticks differ from soft ticks in that they secrete neurotoxins into the blood of the host.
"Tick paralysis, caused by a toxin found in the saliva of I. holocyclus, is a frequent cause of paralysis and death in animals and although rare today, had been fatal in humans before the development of an antivenene." (Lowbridge et al, 2011)The hard tick Ixodes ricinus (see fact sheet at ECDC) has been identified as a vector (transmission agent) for the spiral shaped (spirochete) bacteria Borrelia burgdorferi (see Ireland HSE page).
