There’s nothing more annoying than discovering that you’ve been bitten by a tick after a long walk. Especially since ticks can be extremely dangerous; in the US alone, 300,000 people contract Lyme disease every year as a result of a tick bite. Scientists have now come up with a new solution to hopefully reduce that number: a spray of ant pheromones.
Scientist Claire Gooding participated in the research. She says: “Ticks are often in the same places as we are when we want to enjoy the weather outside.
This makes them very noisy from a chemical
We decided to look at ants (for a solution, ed.) because ants are social insects that often use pheromones to communicate with each other. point of view. It is therefore easy for a tick to predict where ants will be.”
This is important for a tick to know, because buy email database ants naturally hunt ticks. As a result, ticks try to stay away from places where ants can be found as much as possible. The scientists hope to be able to use this to find out which pheromones are repellent to ticks. The research has been published in the journal.
For the research, the scientists used the tick species
Ixodes scapularis . These ticks were divided into different groups and kept in glass tubes. A number of olfactometers were Разкриване на тайните за успешни продажби на застраховки used for the research. An olfactometer is a Y-shaped construction, with a ‘main chamber’ in which the tick was placed in this case. The tick then had the opportunity to move left or right.
On one side, there was always a different mix of ant pheromones, while on the other side there was clean air. The pheromones used came deb directory from the ant species Formica oreas . This ant species has multiple glands, each of which has its own ‘pheromone scent’.
By testing these pheromones separately with olfactometers and then mixing them with each other, it became possible to determine which specific combinations are ultimately perceived as threatening by a tick.
