1. Studying tick behavior is crucial for understanding how climate, disturbances, and land-use changes shape tick populations and tick-borne disease risk. Mark-release-recapture studies can provide valuable answers to questions regarding tick movement and behavior, population sizes, and survivorship. 2. Standard tick mark-release-recapture provides limited resolution to understanding individual behaviors, limiting our ability to answer questions that require repeated observations of the same individuals. We developed a new, operationally simple method to track large populations of individual ticks over space and time. 3. We found non-random movement patterns, including directed movement towards grass, vegetation-dependent dispersal distances and rate, and sex-based differences in movement. 4. This method can be applied to other tick species to assess tick longevity, determine dispersal ranges and rate, and analyze questing behavior and success.
Gobran, S., Brisnehan, J., Wegryn, J., Hemming-Schroeder, E.
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