The Bloodsucker Proxy

Thirsting for knowledge at the nation’s largest repository of ticks

Words by Alexis Hauk | Photos by Gregory Miller

The one time I can remember seeing a tick on me – that I know of for sure – was right after a two-week-long summer camp in middle school. I had been backpacking for days and resting at night in a sleeping bag right on the ground.

As I took my first real shower in what felt like forever, I noticed a lump on the side of my hip – and as I picked at it, I realized with creeping terror that this bit of debris was, in fact, a sanguineous stowaway, feeding and fully embedded on the fleshiest part of the side of my hip.

I remember yelping over the running water, instinctively yanking it right up from its bacchanal of blood, and as I pulled, I also managed to seize a sickeningly squishy chunk of my skin away, too. As the adrenaline subsided, I watched the tick – its mangled body that I had managed to pluck from its feast – and that small piece of me, swirling down the drain.

I can still envision that chunk of my skin, still clutched in the tick’s literal death grip.

That strangely brutal, still-vivid memory was going through my head as I made the three-hour drive from Atlanta to Statesboro, down I-75 South to I-16 East, this past spring. I was en route to the U.S. National Tick Collection, one of the world’s largest curated assemblages of the creepy-crawly – more than 860 separate species representing 96 percent of ticks across the globe.

It was early February, still far too cold to pick up any real ticks outside – in Georgia, they tend to show up in spring, preferring temperatures above 40 degrees. Upon my arrival, I meet up with Dr. Lorenza Beati, the first woman to be appointed head curator of the collection in its entire century of existence.

Beati was born in Bellinzona, Switzerland, about an hour’s drive from the Italian border, the daughter of a federal judge whose job moved them around a lot. When she was just 3 years old, her asthma was so bad, her parents put her in a German-speaking sanatorium for nine months. When she was in high school, they moved to the French part of the country – unsurprisingly, Beati speaks five languages and is an expert at adaptation to new places.

She also technically started her long and storied career in medical school but adds that “officially I'm a physician, but I wouldn't recommend you come to me for medical issues.”

What you can come to her for is an encyclopedic knowledge of ticks, often explained with excitement and bursts of dry humor – what they do, how many varieties there are, and why it’s important to understand everything about them.

Dr. Lorenza Beati, the first woman to be appointed head curator of the U.S. National Tick Collection, wanted to be a veterinarian when she was growing up — until her allergies to most animals made that impossible. Now, those same allergies serve as a perfect alarm system for tick bites when she's working in the field.

Technically part of the Smithsonian Institution but located on Georgia Southern University’s campus, the collection sits humbly in the windowless basement of the Math & Sciences building, and you'd really need to know where to go in order in order to find it. But what it lacks in marketing and décor, it more than makes up for in sheer impressive quantity of specimens and data, contained on shelf after shelf of jars filled with alcohol and deceased ticks, suspended for eternity in various states of maturity and feeding.

These specimens have been organized by genus and alphabetical name, representing locations all over the planet – though Beati hasn’t officially counted them all, it’s got to be in the millions. 

Ticks have eight legs, which makes them more kin to spiders and scorpions than to other crawling things. They’re also mites, a subclass of arachnids.

When they’re full of blood, ticks puff up like a balloon to several times their original size – like a cartoon character ready to float away. And honestly, if you stare long enough at those engorged ticks in those murky jars of liquid, you begin to conjure up the optical illusion of grocery store shelves stocked with olives or capers.

Some vials feature ticks that have been preserved for going on 100 years, from the very first days in Montana.

They even have a presidential parasite in residence – a preserved specimen pulled from Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s dog, the Scottish terrier Fala. That tick was plucked from the pup, so the story goes, following a trip to Warm Springs, Georgia, location of the president’s “Little White House” and where he went for physical therapy in the warm waters to help ease his polio.

There’s also one from an expedition that Teddy Roosevelt took to the Democratic Republic of Congo (then called the Belgian Congo), from a rhinoceros he likely killed to have stuffed and mounted.

Beati’s fascination with “small creatures” started early. When she was little, she’d bring jars from home and collect animals to observe – then release them. “I was not a killer. I didn't want to pin anything on a board.” She spent hours watching caterpillars transform into butterflies, even as “everybody around me was saying she's a bit crazy.”

With such a fervent love of the natural world and animals, she initially thought she might become a vet – until she got the bad news at age 11 that she’s allergic to “almost everything” – news that made her cry for weeks.

Thinking that perhaps she could treat people instead, Beati found her way to medicine, and then biology, eventually getting captivated by a charismatic professor who taught parasitology, which eventually led to ticks.

Interestingly, though, it’s her extremely strong immune response to bug bites – the almost instantaneous allergic reaction it provokes – that makes her particularly well-equipped to know if and when a tick has hitched a ride on her skin. It’s almost like a tick-fighting superpower, though she’s reticent to put it in those terms.

She’s been bitten what she guesses must be “hundreds” of times, but her immune system’s fight reaction to tick bites is so strong, so over the top, it doesn’t ever last long.

For most people – other than Lyme disease, which sometimes leaves its trademark telltale bull’s-eye – it’s not always so easy to tell if you’ve picked up a tick.

Centuries of evolution have turned these critters into a walking pharmacy. As Beati explains it, they’re armed with an entire drugstore just in their spit – the perfect design for a kind of soothing subterfuge.

They make a precise puncture, which releases an instantaneous stream of anesthetics and antihistamines, ensuring that your system’s alarm bells don’t go off.

Most crucially, they also add an anticoagulant, so that they can keep feeding to their wild heart’s desire without worrying about a pesky blood clot blocking their all-you-can-eat buffet. More blood? Yes, please.

As Beati points out, “Ticks don't do it because they want you to get infected or anything. They do it because they want their bite to go unnoticed and last as long as possible so that they can complete their feeding without animals grooming themselves or people scratching or pulling them off.”

 It’s brilliant from a survival standpoint for ticks – they can feed unencumbered. But it also means that your body doesn’t realize it needs to produce antibodies to ward off intruders. This means that any viruses that the tick may be carrying can slip right through, unseen and unmet.

“Imagine you're a pathogen injected in a place that is immunosuppressed. It's like woo-hoo, right?” Beati says. “That’s why so many pathogens have evolved. Maybe they got into ticks accidentally, and then they say, oh, this is a nice place to stay if I want to be transmitted.

 “So it's also that pathogens have evolved to recognize that ticks are a very good delivery system to their host.”

As vectors for illness, ticks can do a lot of damage – inflicting things like Southern tick-associated rash illness (STARI), caused by the Lone Star tick, the most commonly found type of tick in Georgia; or Rocky Mountain spotted fever, which leads to fever, rash, and headache and can even progress to life-threatening sickness or loss of hearing or a limb.

Beautiful but deadly: Although ticks have a kind of strange, vampiric allure, they've also evolved over time into crawling pharmacies, designed to bite without detection. This makes them incredibly efficient vectors for illness.

The collection itself emerged out of an urgent need to understand Rocky Mountain spotted fever. Its history traces way back to the turn of the 20th century, when it was part of the early-days iteration of the National Institutes of Health’s Rocky Mountain Labs in western Montana’s Bitterroot Valley.

In the 1900s, there were no antibiotics for the devastating and deadly fever, which back then earned the nickname “black measles” because of the dark rash it left once the infection had advanced. (Back then, it was rumored to be caused by drinking runoff water from melting snow.)

Enter Dr. Howard Ricketts, the brilliant young – and ultimately doomed – pathologist out of Chicago who led a team of investigators and identified in 1906 that the disease got passed through the mandibles of the Rocky Mountain wood tick.

Just a few years later, despite his success in isolating the bacteria that causes spotted fever (they named it Rickettsia in his honor), the state funding ran out. So he left Montana with a new grant to trace and study a typhus outbreak in Mexico City, where he unfortunately contracted the disease himself and died from it.

Another famous figure hovering in the collection’s history is Clarence Birdseye, frozen food mogul, who as a college lad reportedly spent the spring and summer of 1910 shooting and trapping wild game and rodents to collect ticks for the U.S. Biological Survey – ending up with 4,500, all told.

Not long after, a tick eradication program in Montana emerged, developed by Dr. Robert Cooley of Montana State University, hinged around the idea of encouraging ranchers to drive entire herds of cattle to swim “through a trough of arsenic solution,” according to the National Institute of Allergic and Infectious Disease. “However, preparing an arsenic solution strong enough to be effective, but not so strong as to burn the hides and udders of cattle, was accomplished by trial and error.”

When a couple of the vats were destroyed via dynamite and sledgehammers in two different parts of Montana in 1913, it appears that particular program was abandoned.

Fast-forward through the ensuing decades, and the officially formalized Rocky Mountain Laboratories grew thanks to donations and expeditions worldwide, largely driven by Dr. Harry Hoogstraal, who worked for the U.S. Navy in Cairo – and whose photographs and papers are included in the tick collection archives and who left his enormous personal collection of ticks to the Statesboro site when he died in the 1980s.

The collection arrived in Georgia somewhat circuitously. It was donated in 1983 to the Smithsonian-operated National Museum of Natural History, but due to space and funding issues, it eventually landed at Georgia Southern University in 1990, where it has been stewarded ever since, still owned by the Smithsonian but operated on site in Statesboro.

Dr. Beati in her lab.

Beati has been in Statesboro now for two decades – she lives with her husband, a mathematician and fellow Swiss native whom she met in high school. Beati first arrived in Atlanta in 1996, just in time for the Olympics, still trying to learn English fully.

Shortly thereafter, she met the longtime former curator of the collection, the late James “Jim” Keirans, at a conference in South Africa. She asked if she could visit and discuss some possible collaborations, and the two wound up becoming fast friends.

She spent four years at the public health laboratories at Yale, traveling down to Statesboro for research purposes a couple of times a year to explore the extensive archives.

When an assistant curator position came open, Keirans encouraged Beati to apply. Just a year after she got the gig, he announced he was retiring – having served as head curator from 1969 to 2005. Later, it occurred to Beati that perhaps he had been planning for his imminent succession all along and wanted to ensure the place was left in good hands.

Of course, when I ask Beati if the community is aware of the tick repository, she pauses. School groups come by all the time. But is it embraced? Is it a point of pride? Not exactly. She shares that a couple of weeks ago, she happened to overhear a campus tour guide telling parents and students, “'Oh, and down there, there is this tick place. It’s disgusting.” She wanted to run in pursuit and say, “Wait, no! What we have is really interesting!”

There’s a simultaneous ubiquity and mystery around ticks. The mystery, perhaps, stems from people’s aversion to knowing more about things that give us the heebie-jeebies.

“Sometimes people don't realize how much work we do. We have visitors from all over the world coming every year. And they want to work in the collection, examine our specimens, or work with us in the lab, or it depends, a lot of different needs,” Beati says.

For the last five years, every summer, the collection has hosted a “Tick Workshop,” which brings to campus a gaggle of scientists to nerd out about tick identification, classification, genetics, molecular taxonomy, ecology and behavior, tick-borne diseases. It costs $1,450 to attend, and yes, there is a wait list to get in.

The collection features more than 860 separate species representing 96 percent of ticks across the globe. Some vials feature ticks that have been preserved for going on a century. There's even a presidential parasite in residence – a preserved specimen pulled from Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s dog, the Scottish terrier Fala.

By late March – after weeks of tick-deterring rain and cold – I finally get a chance to join Beati on a proper expedition to find ticks in their natural habitat. We drive to the site of the day, where two of her undergraduate thesis students are preparing tools for the “hunt,” on a side road that’s mostly abandoned, in an area set for more campus construction in the near future.

 Beati said she has seen students give up on the field collection process, especially before the ticks emerge full force. This kind of work takes tremendous patience – days when you get nothing are still valuable datawise. But it can get boring. She adds that today will probably be the first truly “ticky” day they’ve had this year – and I take the chance to make sure my pants are fully tucked into my socks.

 As we park, I watch junior undergraduate honor students Ella Zierdt of Huntsville, Alabama, and Mary Kate Humphrey of Chatsworth, Georgia, getting coolers ready to fill with dry ice. The CO2 emissions seep out of small holes they’ve drilled in the sides. This, to a tick, mimics the smell of a live host. These Nosferat-icks can pick up on your breath, the smells you give off, your heat, and your vibrations as you move through the world. They’re waiting, lurking, or – in scientific terms – “questing.”

In the coolers, the dry ice melts more slowly, which will give Beati’s team longer to observe the ticks in the area flocking to check out the tempting smell of this Trojan rabbit or cow. It’s a tip that Beati got from a researcher friend in Texas who uses the same method. Then they put cardboard underneath, so they can better see the ticks that are flocking to the scent.

They break up the ice by throwing it onto the pavement, making sure not to break the bag, and then carefully dumping it into the coolers with gloves. There are six coolers in total, with half a bag of dry ice in each.

I’ve made sure to wear clothes that cover my arms and legs, with my socks pulled up to my calves. I spray some Cutter all around my ankles, though Beati says it’s not enough and sprays me down even more.

 Between the two friends, Humphrey is more outdoorsy, while Zierdt is more reserved. They’re writing separate theses, with Humphrey focusing on the viral side and Zierdt on the molecular biology side of their research.

We traipse over a broken-down fence and into the overgrowth. The site has the feeling of an abandoned party locale since there are multiple bottles strewn about. A mysterious shed nearby, Zierdt says, can be disquieting to think about.

Their approach is to set up a grid in the clearing and undergrowth so that they can map out the density of ticks in the area. There are 10 meters between each flag. 100 by 100 meters.

Consistency and pacing are key for collecting the right kind of data.

They put the CO2 traps down in the corners of the grid. They must first clear the leaves and debris away so that it’s preferable for the ticks to just climb onto the cardboard, rather than weaving around through the foliage. Beati tells us to “put yourself into the mind of a tick.”

The ones that lurk on vegetation can be caught by the white flannel drag cloths, which have more catch when you pull them along the grass. The tick’s legs will get caught in the material.

Dr. Beati and her students, in search of bloodsuckers in the wild. As Beati advises: “Put yourself in the mind of a tick.”

Humphrey and Zierdt crouch into a walking squat, dragging the bright cloths along the top of the overgrown grass and the ground. Then they stop, carefully look at both sides and count the ticks they’ve picked up.

This is where it becomes clear how many years in the field Beati has already had – and that despite her self-deprecating comments about never wearing the right glasses, she can spot a tick a mile away. The specks I assume are just dirt, she immediately identifies, even pointing out the adults versus nymphs.

We hit a few obstacles. At one point, the drag cloth upends the top of an ant hill, inviting a swarm that forces the students to shake off all contents, losing whatever else they’d picked up.

But soon after, we check one of the traps and spot five ticks already actively moving toward the opening with the C02 from the dry ice. Turns out, it’s boom times for ticks on this day.

Very casually, Humphrey captures one of these cooler pilgrims on her finger, then turns the vial over to douse it in alcohol. The good news is, unlike when a mosquito lands on you and bites immediately, a tick will take its time. If you catch it on your finger, I’ll try crawling further up, to find a place to hide away, so it can feed to its little heart’s content, hoping it doesn’t get discovered.

“They're not going to bite in two seconds,” Beati says. “They will start walking around a little bit and assess if it's safe. Of course, if you keep a tick in your fingers for like 10 minutes, it'll bite you because in the end it'll be so pissed off.”

Humphrey’s catch gets completely submerged in the vial but, with all the grit and persistence of a finely tuned pest, it swims all the way up to the top, grasping at the slippery sides and trying to get out. This, in liquid that is 90 percent alcohol. Beati points out that this is why these things are so hard to kill off.

In fact, studies have shown that ticks can survive on clothes that go on a full cycle through the washing machine. A dryer is a better bet because the high heat may kill ticks, but – Beati cautions – it also depends on how high the heat gets and how long they’re in there.

What about rain? Doesn’t it wash them away? “If there is flooding and they can reach a stem, they will go up and just wait until the things are over. They will find a way,” Beati says, straight up channeling Ian Malcolm.

Once, Beati was working in a lab with some live ticks and had them trapped under a heavy glass Petri dish. “I said, oh, that's heavy enough to keep them in while I was doing something else. And I kept hearing, click, click, click, and the ticks were there pushing up the heavy lid all together until one tick got one leg out, pushed up the lid, and everybody went out.”

She managed to catch and contain them again – but it was an impressive statement about their persistence. They don’t exactly move as a unit, but they can, en masse, accidentally benefit from being in a group all doing the same thing individually. It’s not collaboration – just the benefit of the horde.

After just a couple of hours, we’re all beginning to sweat in the sun, and Beati and her students begin to run out of space in the 10 vials they’ve brought. “You’re good luck for us,” says Zierdt. “You have to come with us every time!” Beati quickly assures me, “That’s a compliment!”

A single tick may lay between 2,000 to 10,000 eggs, depending on the species.  There are also ticks for just about every kind of animal. Sloths in South America. Deer and dogs here. There are even ticks that live on the wings of seabirds in Antarctica. 

The story of ticks is part horror flick and part good old-fashioned love story. Without scientists who genuinely adore getting to know more and more about ticks, well, we’d never come to understand how these verdure-dwelling vampires behave.

And it’s that kind of knowledge that’ll become increasingly useful as warming temperatures accelerate our interaction with ticks wherever there are blades of grass. And with new varieties popping up, these small animals with the big bite are only growing their ranks. (According to a report last year, the yearly rate of tick-borne disease cases has more than doubled in the U.S. in the past two decades.)

As an active working researcher and scientist, Beati travels a lot – lately, back and forth to Uganda, as she uses a USDA grant to set up an exchange over the next five years with scientists in Kampala to study a new and concerning tick that transmits a lethal hemorrhagic fever, with symptoms like Ebola, for which there is no treatment.

This is currently taking place in dryer areas like Africa and the Middle East. According to Beati, it’s the first time a disease has been transmitted from tick to person and then from person to person, without the need for having another tick transmission in between – which is concerning.

She has been negotiating with the government in Kampala to be able to get in to do research in the national parks. A condition of the grant is for most of the funds to be used in Uganda to buy equipment, prepare the labs there, and train Ugandan scientists. She’ll also have a Ph.D. student from Uganda coming to the Georgia Southern campus to do his dissertation in the next year.

Understanding ticks and how they operate will only become more important as climate change drives global temperatures ever higher. Thankfully, there are scientists like Dr. Beati, who find awe and wonder in the creepy crawly.

All of this is so that the research stays in the country where it originated. “I said, listen, I'm delighted about getting this money, but I want to make sure that you understand clearly that I don't want to go robbing the country, which is such an old model of science in general,” she said.

In many ways, the mission of Beati and the collection might seem a bit daunting. After all, a single tick may lay between 2,000 to 10,000 eggs, depending on the species. And in some cases, if the female tick is infected, part of her eggs may also be carrying the pathogen.

 There are also ticks for just about every kind of animal. Sloths in South America. Deer and dogs here. There are even ticks that live on the wings of seabirds in Antarctica. 

No animal with blood is safe from ticks. There are even some of these bloodsuckers that feed on snakes. (One terrifying tale from 2019 involved a python that was rescued in Australia with “so many ticks it looked like scales” – over 500 of them, all feeding at once.)

Ticks come in fast and slow varieties. One of the fastest kinds is the ticks that live in the desert, often found on camels and cattle. And although they can’t fly, ticks can still travel. Not by planes, trains, or automobiles, but by bird, especially one that’s migrating. That’s how they think the longhorn tick, an invasive species first discovered a few years ago in New Jersey, can produce an embryonic egg without fertilization. “They don’t waste time and energy trying to find a mate,” Beati says.

 But there’s a kind of ominous beauty to all of them – that they’re so well designed to carry forward a very simple mission. “What they produce just to be able to feed, to me, it's an amazing thing. If you look at them under the scope and you see all the little details, you see them a little bit closer, you start appreciating them,” Beati said.

 She adds, with a smile, that the world has a great sense of irony sometimes – evidenced by the fact that the most beautiful of all ticks, in her opinion, is a kind that happens to live primarily on the inner canal of a hippopotamus’ derriere – pretty much never to be seen or appreciated by anyone. Another of nature’s great mysteries, just waiting to be cracked. ◊