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Deer are not the only mammals to blame for Lyme disease
From mice to acorns to climate change, the uptick in Lyme is an interconnected web
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Chipmunks, shrews, and birds can infect backlegged ticks with the bacterium that causes Lyme disease, but white-footed mice are the most common, infection-generating first meal for baby ticks.Weber/Getty Images/iStockphoto
Though Lyme disease has historically been blamed upon the overabundant white-tailed deer that host so-called deer ticks, a much smaller mammal scampering around your yard plays an outsized role in the spread of Lyme.
“White-footed mice are one of the most important determinants for how many ticks there are in the environment and how many infected ticks there are,” says Dr. Richard Ostfeld, who studies the ecology of Lyme and other tick-borne diseases at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, one of the world’s premier centers for ecological research.
Turdus migratorius – exhibits a dizzying array of migration strategies.
camera icon © JIM NELSON/SHUTTERSTOCK
“Obviously, the seasons are changing with climate change,” said Jahn, whose robin work is part of Indiana University’s Grand Challenges initiative, a program that includes studying preparedness for environmental shifts. “So we can start using these birds as sentinels of that change.”
Jahn was surprised to learn that though robins are ubiquitous, they had been relatively little studied and their migration patterns were poorly understood. The problem was a lack of data. For more than a century, scientists have studied bird migration through banding they attach an aluminum band with a unique code to the bird’s leg but this approach yields few data points as birds are rarely caught again, and the location of their capture could be anywhere along their migration path. Tracking devices were first used decades ago on large birds such as
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