if you've ever wondered, "How do you wash a tick?"....here you go!
when an inconceivably vast mountain of your favorite food runs you several times through a special tiny washing machine it built just for that purpose and you don’t even have enough brain cells to know it :(
The number of people asking “seriously why though” gives away how many of you play tumblr videos with sound off since the science lady explains every step in detail, and how they need to be kept free of fungi or other contaminants for her research. Her whole tiktok is about her career as a professional tick expert :)
I am deaf and bad at seeing also, can someone give subtitles lol (am a scientist and i love ticks) (not on me or my friends) (friends are doggies and kitties and--)
So, today I’m gonna show you how we wash our ticks. This is really important to do because ticks live in damp conditions which means that they’re very susceptible to fungus growth.
So the first thing we do is take our ticks out of their old container and we pop them into a solution of 10% bleach with a little bit of dish soap added just to make sure that the ticks sink to the bottom. It’s really important to mention that everything we do with the ticks is safe and doesn’t harm them at all. They’re perfectly happy, even if they do get a little bit dizzy when we vortex them. So as you’ve just seen, we give them a little bit of a spin on the vortex, and that just makes sure that they get nice and clean, and then we’ll empty them out into the sieve, leaving no man behind.
We then change the solution in our tube to 70% ethanol, this is partially to get rid of the beach, um, and just to give them a bit of an extra clean. And as you can see, they’re perfectly happy and lively. Again, we give them just another little spin. I don’t know whether ticks actually get dizzy, but they’ve never seemed to be that disorientated after. And again, we pour them into our sieve to get them out of the ethanol and it also means we can collect all the waste liquid at the bottom easily.
For the final stage, we’ll fill up our tube with a little bit of water. Ticks are perfectly happy in water for an extended period of time. They have a reduced requirement for oxygen, which means they breath about once every fifteen minutes, so they can spend a long time just hanging about. Once we’ve given them a final spin, we then put them on a bit of blue towel, just to help dry them out a little bit. As you can see they get very lively at this point, and we pop them into their new container. We’ve gotta be very careful when we’re doing this to make sure that we have no escapees. For our last step, we secure some new cloth onto the top of the lid to make sure that the ticks can’t escape but they have a nice breathable enclosure.
For people who also asked what research is done with live ticks:
There's actually no possible end to the data live organisms provide. Seriously none. You can test how every possible environmental factor - temperature, humidity, water quality, air quality, every possible pollutant - affects that organism's growth and activity in almost infinite combinations. How their sensory systems react to every stimulus you throw at them. What microbial symbiotes they may harbor and why. What affects their mating behavior and egg production and plenty else.
All these things can tell you something about an animal's interaction with its ecosystem but ticks are of course also significant to humankind because some species can carry disease, which not only makes it worth knowing how they fare under different chemicals or climates but opens up an entire new world of things to test such as how long it takes pathogens to transfer from tick to host, how long pathogens can live in their gut, whether *that's* affected by environmental conditions, what in an environment might reduce their fertility or discourage mating, whether there are surfaces they have more difficulty climbing, whether anything applied to human skin discourages biting or alters feeding time, whether they're affected by different medications in the blood they consume, the actual effectiveness of every alleged natural repellent, how their salivary compounds function and a million other things relevant to people's health and safety!
She hasn't said what experiment she was prepping them for here but everything you can possibly test might be useful to combating the spread of things like Lyme disease. We even know from the washing itself that they can survive all that bleach and ethanol! That right there was pretty important to know!
You can spend your entire life studying exactly one single living species and never run out of discoveries :)
#its so silly especially since this is actual science being done#wish i could just put ticks into a silly little washing machine and keep them in little jars all day
Nothing is stopping you from doing that if you want to.
"...even if they do get a little bit dizzy when we vortex them" killed me. There's just something about the fact that this doesn't hurt them at all. vortexable little beasts
