If you think spiders have an image problem, try working on ticks...
Why would anyone want to work on ticks?
A friend who rescues hedgehogs asked me to look at some ticks. Sickly rescue hedgehogs seem to be particularly prone to tick infestation. I had a bad experience with ticks a couple of years ago, but so far, I've never been bitten and with the prevalence of Lyme Disease now, I am very careful when I'm out. In fact, compared with mites which are everywhere (and which I feel a little bit guilty about not working on), I never see ticks in the field, so my first thought, with rescued hedgehogs coming in from all over the County, was Oh good, a ready source of specimens. We know very little about ticks in VC55. In the middle of a zoonotic pandemic, that's really a shameful situation since apart from stupid behaviour like eating bats, we don't know where the next zoonotic pandemic is coming from - only that there will be one.
Ticks are Arachnids, so no problem - except that I'm an Araneae guy who knows very little about Acari. Obviously the place to start was with some basic research. Ticks fall into two groups, Ixodidae the hard-bodied ticks and Argasidae - soft ticks. That's nice because it eliminates half of them to start with as the specimens I had were clearly Ixodidae (internal spur on Coxa1 and genital aperture between Coxa3):
Next was time for some research on hedgehog ticks, which led me to a few interesting facts. It's commonly assumed that the ticks found on hedgehogs are Hedgehog Ticks, Ixodes hexagonus, but in fact they're equally likely to be Sheep/Deer Ticks, Ixodes ricinus. I'd been under the impression that Ixodes ricinus was the main vector for Lyme Disease, but it turns out that lots of tick species are responsible, including Hedgehog Ticks. It wasn't too hard to decide that these were Ixodes hexagonus and not I. ricinus - palps slope inwards, Tarsi1 are stepped:
There are a lot of people who would like to improve the public reaction to spiders, and wasps have had a lot of good PR recently for their role in controlling pest insects, so to rehabilitate the tick, let's compile a list of their beneficial aspects. Well there's ... umm - it's a tricky sell.