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A buck feeds from a
plastic 4-poster. The design of the device causes the buck to tilt its head
toward the application rollers, ensuring that Tickicide is transferred to its
head, neck, and ears. Click the image for more information about
it.
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Continuing the Fight Against Cattle Ticks
By Alfredo
Flores June 8, 2006
An innovative device called a "four-poster" and chemical "tickicides"
are two tools Agricultural Research Service (ARS) scientists are using to protect the
southern U.S. border from ticks that carry serious cattle disease.
The southern cattle tick (Boophilus microplus) and the cattle-fever
tick (B. annulatus) transmit the two species of blood parasites (Babesia bovis
and B. bigemina) that cause the cattle diseases known as cattle fever, Texas
fever or bovine babesiosis.
Before their eradication in 1943, tick-carried diseases crippled the
U.S. cattle industry. Today, descendants of the ticks that caused those losses
can still be found in Mexico. To keep them out, inspectors maintain constant
vigilance at the border, preventing infested cattle from entering the United
States. But what about wildlife that freely roam?
ARS entomologist
Mat
Pound and colleagues are investigating strategies for reducing the
likelihood that fever-carrying ticks would reappear. They work at the ARS
Knipling-Bushland
U.S. Livestock Insects Research Laboratory in Kerrville, Texas. In 1938,
the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)
established a permanent quarantine area, or "buffer zone," in southern Texas--a
narrow, 500-mile-long strip along the Rio Grande. For nearly 50 years, the
Kerrville lab has provided technical support to this Cattle Fever Tick
Eradication Program.
Since the buffer zone was created, the number of cattle tick fever
introductions there has varied from year to year. But a significant increase
has occurred over the past five years, even in the "tick-free" area north of
the buffer zone.
To combat the spread of ticks by wildlife, the Kerrville scientists
developed and patented the four-poster device that attracts mostly white-tailed
deer--the main secondary hosts for cattle fever ticks in southern Texas--with
whole-kernel corn. When a deer feeds, its head and neck brush against
pesticide-saturated rollers. Later, when it grooms itself, the pesticide
spreads enough to protect its entire body.
Pound and colleagues have tested a permethrin-containing acaricide in
the four-poster and are also feeding infested deer whole-kernel corn treated
with ivermectin or other systemic acaricides.
Read more
about this research in the June 2006 issue of Agricultural Research magazine.
ARS is the USDA's principal scientific research agency.