Photo Credit: Noah Edelman
Do ticks tick you off? Does the thought of Lyme leave a sour taste in your mouth? I don’t mean to frighten you, but, if you live in New York City, tick bites might be closer than you think. In the urban parks of New York, ticks lurk in unexpected places— something I learned early on in my summer job as a Research Assistant in the Columbia Eco-Epidemiology Lab.
My job is simple: I hunt ticks. Perhaps that doesn’t quite capture the image, though. It’s an average Tuesday morning. I’m walking through Clark Botanical Gardens, one of the more manicured sites we check for ticks. I’m in a white painter’s suit and blue Columbia hat, lugging a roll of thick corduroy fabric, which is attached to a dowel rod and rope setup that allows it to be dragged over the ground in maximal contact with foliage and leaf litter.
The thick ridges of the corduroy fabric tempt ticks by imitating the texture of animal fur. The corduroy’s light color makes the miniscule ticks easier to pick out on its surface. My pant legs are tucked into my socks to prevent ticks from getting to my skin, and both the socks and suit have been soaked in permethrin, an insecticide that kills ticks, but doesn’t scare them away— a crucial feature, as we can wear it without interfering with our tick collection data.
Every ten meters that we drag the cloth, we flip it over and scrutinize it with tweezers in hand, ready to grab any tick we see and immerse it in a vial of RNA shield solution that will preserve it for PCR testing. Moving through the gardens, I pass a group of grandmothers, who briefly glance my way, bemused by the oddball in the strange getup walking through the bushes. When we return a few weeks later, I’ll be asking them to participate in a survey we’re administering about how people interact with the park and their degree of awareness of tick-borne disease risk.
Each site is frequented by different clientele: the rugged, hilly trails occupied by marathon runners and hard-core hikers; the lush, manicured gardens filled with families and retirees; the playgrounds and parks where parents flock to let their children run wild for a few hours.
At each site, we check for ticks along trails, along the treeline, and in the park’s unmaintained interior, often involving treks through thornbushes, poison ivy, and surprise wildlife encounters. Each of these zones can be hard to find in certain parks, depending on where they sit on the gradient between human-oriented (trail-heavy) and nature-oriented (unmaintained interior-heavy) management.
People often approach us and ask what we are doing. “Checking for ticks!” we enthusiastically respond. Replies vary. One enthusiastic passerby in Brooklyn immediately proclaimed “Get ‘em! Get em! Kill ‘em all!” Another, hearing that we studied ticks, took off his shirt and proudly showed my coworker a recent tick bite on his back. “What should I do about it?” he unabashedly inquired.
Yet, our purpose is neither extermination (dragging for ticks doesn’t even make a dent in their population) nor clinical treatment (none of us are qualified to give people medical advice.) Our purpose is to collect data on ticks for study and analysis.
With this year’s tick-dragging endeavor being funded by Pfizer, our first priority is to generate data that will assist in their project of developing a Lyme disease vaccine. Our data are also part of a longitudinal project by the eco-epidemiology lab to collect annual data on tick populations and distribution.
Because our data are going in multiple directions at once, we collect many types of data points at each site: not only the ticks themselves, but information about temperature, humidity, type of terrain, and more. We also conduct surveys, asking people about their exposures to ticks and perception of their level of risk.
When it comes down to it, what we are doing is the formal scientific version of what every child playing in the forest does when they flip over rocks and see what’s under them: we’re probing the contents of the forest floor to better understand what’s there. Though we measure our environment with aching precision and produce results that have a real-life impact on public health, the true joy of our work lies in that simple curiosity: the opportunity to explore the green spaces around us, and to find out how we just might be able to interact with them a little bit more safely.
By: Noah Edelman CC’27