This is Scientific Americans 60 Second Science. I'm Jason Goldman. Got a minute?

Ticks. The tiny arachnids feed on the blood of mammals, birds, and sometimes even reptiles and amphibians.

And disease causing parasites travel in that blood, from tick to victim and from victim to tick.

The most familiar tick-born illness is probably Lyme disease, but ticks can also transfer

Rocky Mountain spotted fever, tularemia, cue fever, and even a form of encephalitis. Without treatment many of these diseases can be fatal.

Keeping tick populations in check is thus good for public health,

and it seems that the mere presence of large wildlife helps.

Because a new study done in Kenya

finds that areas without large wildlife

saw tick populations rise as much as 370%.

The finding in the proceedings of the Royal Society B caught researchers by surprise, because ticks love to land on large animals.

We expected if we lost large animals that we would also lose ticks.

University of California Santa Barbara Ecologist Georgia Titcombe.

Before they get to their big targets such as deer or antelopes, ticks attack small mammals like rodents.

So what we found is when you lose the large animals, you have an increase in a hyperabundance of these rodents.

Because those rodents are not being eaten or are simply displaced by the bigger animals missing from the environment.

So the ticks happily feed on rodents, after which they'd normally look for a bigger animal

to parasitize before reproducing.

Now with no large mammals available, humans could become an attractive tick target, and

more likely to come down with the various tick-carried conditions.

The study demonstrates one of the many ways in which biodiversity loss can be detrimental not

just for wildlife but for people too.

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