Posted: October 4, 2008 

We  know very little about the social and sexual lives of ticks. We have no idea what makes them tick.  We don’t know what makes one tick attractive to another tick. They have no bars or online dating to meet each other. They have no eyes, no ears; they seem to rely on smell to find each other. It’s a miracle that they survive to pass on their genes. But 2,6-dichlorophenol, a tick specific sex pheromone, seems to be as effective as alcohol is for humans, at getting ticks to drop their inhibitions, throw caution to the wind and get them to bump uglys.

After they mate the female then climbs high into a tree, bush or shrub and waits. Exposed to the elements she just sits there, hoping that a passing bird will not eat her. Conception has not yet occurred. She holds the sperm cells inside her; they are in long-term storage. She must be patient, extremely patient. She cannot fertilize her eggs until she feeds and it may be months or even years before she next eats. Then the breeze brings her a whiff of Butyric acid, the tick has no idea what that is, she only knows it as C3H7COOH. It a sex attractant given off by mammals. If follows us around like a cheap Cologne. We give it off from our skin, from our naughty bits. It makes us attractive to each other, but it makes female ticks crazy with blood lust. Smelling it the tick throws herself at the area where the smell is strongest. If she is lucky she lands on a passerby. If she is unlucky she must climb up again and wait. Once riding her new host she starts to head towards the skin. Once there she borrows her beak down through the epidermis and starts to drink. She gorges herself in her hosts blood until she can take no more, she then drops off, fertilizes her eggs, which she lays in the soil and dies.
No one has trained her how to do this, her mother died long before she hatched. It is instinct. There is no emotion in it. She is simply drawn by a series of chemicals that awake a dormant evolutionary drive within her. It is not personal, just instinct.
All that being said it felt pretty personal when I found a deer tick on my scrotum on fifth day of the last trip I was on. It didn’t feel very biological. It felt much more like a personal affront. I was not happy.

You could say that it is just an occupational hazard. If you say this you have never had a tick on your nut sack. This is something that someone should never just accept. I have PTSD. I may never recover fully.