Fear the tick, a tiny predator
Posted by staff / February 29, 2012
Ticks hunt potential hosts like predators after prey, and those host animals are more wary of parasites than previously thought.
Ticks hunt their prey by following vapor trails of carbon dioxide. They consume host tissues (blood is considered a tissue), so at least in terms of its interactions with other creatures, it is a predator, though a tiny one.
Ecologists are increasingly finding it useful to think of parasites, such as ticks, as micro-predators and have been mining predator-prey theory for insights into parasite-host ecology.This notion that prey are not victims but players, as strongly motivated by fear as the predators are by hunger, is called the ecology of fear.
Work at Washington University in St. Louis, just published in the journal EcoHealth, shows that the ecology of fear, like other concepts from predator-prey theory, also extends to parasites.
Full story at Futurity.
Photo credit: Jonathan Myers, WUSTL
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