Ticks are back in Saskatchewan

Spring is a wonderful time to take in the great outdoors, get some fresh air, enjoy a little exercise and take in nature.

But while you’re having all of that fun in the sun, you want to make sure you don’t wind up with a creepy little black parasite sucking on you.

It’s tick season.

Dr. Emily Jenkins, a professor of veterinary microbiology at the University of Saskatchewan, joined Gormley this week to share more information on the insects.

For one, their behaviour this year is a bit different than what you would expect.

“Ticks are really, really affected by seasonal differences and year-over-year differences in temperature and precipitation … This year is kind of bucking the trend a little bit in that our ticks seem to be getting a later start to the year,” she explained.

She’s able to see that with the use of eTick, an app and website introduced three years ago.

Anyone can take a photo of a tick if they see one, mark their location and send it in.

“If you’re one of those golfers or dog walkers who frequently encounters ticks, you might want to get the app on your phone,” Jenkins said.

“You can search and look at where ticks have been found and over what time period, so you can actually pull up a map. We’re starting to get some really interesting data that lets us look at those trends over time.”

For one, they usually begin crawling around in mid-April, but it has taken them until May to come out in force this year.

There have also been ticks in some unusual places.

“We’re actually getting ticks as far north as Meadow Lake, Prince Albert, Carrot River — places you don’t generally associate with ticks. Although so far, it looks like Saskatoon is our hot spot, unfortunately,” Jenkins explained.

So what should people look for?

There’s one specific type of tick they’re more likely to encounter.

“The dog tick is about 98 per cent of our submissions, so that’s what we mostly see. It is what we call an ornate tick, or a fancy-looking tick. It has white splotches and patterns over its back, depending on if it’s male or female. That is the one that is probably the one you’re going to find on your dogs,” she said.

“It’s not too picky, so it will go on people as well, though it does prefer dogs.”

The key to getting rid of them is just checking to see if any are crawling around on a person’s body.

“When they’re still crawling around, you can just grab them. If you’re squeamish, you can use tweezers,” she said with a laugh.

But it gets bad if they manage to sink their jaws in and start sucking.

“Ticks are kind of amazing. I know no one loves them, not even people who study them, but they’re really cool,” Jenkins said with a giggle.

“They have an amazing ability to anchor. So they put their mouthparts in, they anchor on there, and then they secrete essentially a glue blob. So if you leave a tick long enough, it will actually secrete a glue seal that affixes it really strongly to your skin or your animal’s skin, and then they just happily feed away.”

That’s gross.

But thankfully, those dog ticks do not carry Lyme disease.

Jenkins said a different species, called deer ticks, are responsible for that illness.

“(Deer ticks) are not established here yet, and they’re the ones we really worry about,” she said.