The New York Times reports:

Most people try, or at least hope, to avoid ticks. The tiny arachnids spread a variety of harmful diseases as they expand their range to new areas. But two scientists recently set out on a counterintuitive mission to collect as many bloodsucking ticks as possible.

“We had quite a few nice afternoons of frolicking around forests with bedsheets,” Sam England, a biologist at the Natural History Museum in Berlin, said. “Just dragging them, picking up the ticks.”

He and Katie L. Lihou, friends and doctoral students at the University of Bristol in England at the time, were attempting to combine their research topics into a single collaborative project. Dr. Lihou is a veterinary parasitologist who studies ticks, and Dr. England is an ecologist who studies electricity and electroreception.

The resulting paper, published Friday in the journal Current Biology, provides a new reason to worry about ticks. The scientists demonstrate that the static electric fields naturally produced by animals (including humans) can physically yank the ungainly creatures onto their hosts. By electrically extending their reach, ticks may be able to grab hold of hosts more easily. While the finding may add to ticks’ terrifying attributes, this knowledge could also be used to improve antistatic tick defenses. [Continue reading…]