Recommended Viewing: Questing Ticks by MYRMECOS

Three years ago, Ryan and I got to witness the miracle of life. Some eggs we had in a specimen jar hatched and we became the adoptive parents of hundreds of baby ticks. (We weren’t good parents, mind you, our charges all perished). Although our hearts raced at the thought of the vial breaking in our home, we still were fascinated by the behavior of the little ones. They always wanted to be high up, so they would climb to the top of the vial. We would flip it over and they could climb back up and so on. In Ryan’s post “Fun with Tick Clockwork“, he described the phenonmenon as “like some twisted version of an hourglass, appropriate for some Tim Burton film.”

I didn’t realize it at the time, but the verb for what the ticks were doing is called “questing”. I learned this from the blog MYRMECOS where Biologist and Photographer Alex Wild managed to make this creepy behavior look beautiful. He posted some Tick Questing pictures last week. I recommend a look-see!

Enjoy and may your summer be free of real-live questing ticks. : )

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