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On clear days between October and April in Texas' big thicket national preserve,

you can spot groups of researchers wandering the trails.

We leave early in the morning about eight drive for about two hours until we get to a big ticket.

That's Adela Aliva Chavez.

She's a medical entomologist, a field all about the tiny critters that make us sick.

And she wears a pretty specific outfit to hunt for her favorite arachnid, ticks.

We are wearing light loads, so something white, something peach, like light color,

so that if by any chance we get any ticks crawling on us, we can see them.

As they walk through the preserve, they do something called draggy.

So we come with a piece of white cloth that is attached to a piece of wood.

It's being dragged on the floor, so it's on the vegetation on top of the vegetation,

and it just passes and brushes through.

We count to ten or a hundred.

While we work, stop and check if we have an adult tick.

We put it in a bile containing a solution that preserves DNA and RNA.

Adela's fascination with ticks began early in her life.

I grew up in a farm, in a cattle farm in Honduras, and in the cattle you see a lot of the ticks.

And also in people.

When I was a kid, my twin sister actually felt ill.

At the time, doctors didn't know what was making her sister sick.

They later determined she had a vector-born disease, meaning it was transmitted from something like a tick or mosquito.

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