Relapsing Fever Tick:
General Description
- The adult soft tick has eight legs, rounded body, dimples on their body, and mouthparts hidden from view when seen from above.
Life Cycle and Common Characteristics
- Female ticks lay eggs in batches, with each batch of eggs produced after taking a blood meal.
- A female may lay from 25 to several hundred eggs during her lifetime.
- Relapsing fever ticks go through four developmental stages: eggs, larvae, nymphs and adults.
- They feed for only about 15-30 minutes and then leave the host
Credit: Gary Hettrick RML, NIAID – CDC
Damage and Medical Implications
- Infected soft ticks in the genus Ornithodoros and Carios transmit tick-borne relapsing fever.
- It is a bacterial infection with symptoms that include repeated episodes of fever, headache, muscle, bleeding, stiff neck, joint aches, nausea and vomiting, weakness, and coma. These symptoms usually continue for 2 to 9 days, then disappear
- The ticks typically prefer to feed on hosts in their nests or burrows.
- The ticks seldom come into contact with people. They emerge at night and feed briefly while the person is sleeping and the bites are painless.
- Infected people develop sickness between 5 and 15 days after they are bitten.
