Looks like a bunch of New Jersey residents survived the winter. But that is not really good news. On Friday, the New Jersey Department of Agriculture announced the latest follow-up to what was described in a February 2018 publication in the Journal of Medical Entomology. The publication detailed an “uptick” in the New Jersey population that occurred last Summer. On August 1 , 2017, after shearing a 12-year-old Icelandic sheep named Hannah, a farmer went to the Hunterdon County Health Office with
some new companions. Thousands of them, in fact. No, she didn’t form a flash mob. Instead, she had thousands of ticks covering her body. Yes, you can say ewe and ewwwww. What was particularly disturbing about this situation (besides the fact that she was covered with thousands of ticks) was that this was a tick species not typically found in the United States. And it certainly wasn’t one of the 5 tick species that were known to be present in New Jersey, which, of course, you know are Ixodes scapularis, Amblyomma americanum, Dermacentor variabilis, Rhipicephalus sanguineus, and Ixodes cookei. READ MORE
