Martha’s Vineyard Medical hosted a morning of talks on Saturday by smart and interesting people about ticks and the diseases they bring. The discussion ranged from the increase in tick populations, to what might be called “situational etiologies,” to dialogue about the possible elimination (or, more realistically, reduction) of the deer population, to the uses of permethrin, to symptoms and treatment once a bite has had its bad effects.

Paradoxically, although the idea of intentionally reducing the deer population was advanced, other than references to chemicals that are not particularly felicitous to be spread too widely, there was no discussion regarding possible means of directly reducing the tick population. But with technologies we have already developed, it seems possible to come up with an apparatus that could travel over a lawn or grassy field while collecting a substantial number of ticks.

In what they do for a living, ticks are effectively trying to get picked up, to be taken from their place where they are poised (usually), or are crawling along looking to make trouble. Because of this, we ought to be able to come up with something that effectively gathers them in.

Tick sampling is often done in the field just by dragging a cloth through the grass. Ticks will load up on the cloth, not infrequently in large congregations (“tick bombs”). One can thus imagine an apparatus on wheels that travels at about human/animal walk speeds (think Roomba or some traveling sprinkler/irrigation setups), dragging a cloth or similar from which said ticks are then mechanically scraped into a containment. That containment can be lined with a paper bag (a bit like a lightweight version of a vacuum cleaner bag). When full, the paper bag would be removed and incinerated in a metal can. Ashes to ashes, tick souls dispatched to tick heaven.

It would be good to have initial meetings to work on developing such an apparatus, available at a reasonable price that could make our Island (and much of our world) a better place — and without doing it by means of chemicals.

Benjamin Reeve

West Tisbury