First Tick of the Season

Probably the only tick of the season. The last one I saw in Scotland was about four years ago, under embarrassing circumstances. My new boyfriend Bunty had taken me into the bonny Highlands to meet his mother, who lives in a beautiful wilderness, with numerous animals running freely around her cottage. She is generally in tune with nature. I was keen to impress her.

Her dog Pipkin liked me, which was a good start. I found a tick on Pipkin’s neck, and proudly identified it.

“A tick!” I said.

Bunty’s mother remarked that she has great trouble removing ticks, because it’s so hard to do without leaving the head in, which then gets infected.

“Ah!” I said. “I’m great at removing ticks.”

I told her about the pack of feral dogs I ran around with as a child in Greece, and about the enormous juicy ticks they would pick up from the marsh grass. I said I’d learned a foolproof technique from the locals for removing them, and I was well-practised. You twist it slowly clockwise, then quickly anticlockwise with an upward yank, and presto!

“I’ll remove it for you,” I declared, and before Bunty’s mother could stop me, I had grasped it and twisted its head off.

There was a long, difficult silence. Bunty’s mother was none too pleased. The subject of ticks has not been raised between us since. Unlike me, Pipkin survived her tick ordeal without any trauma at all.

This year’s tick was on the neck of our rabbit Broccles. It attached itself a few days ago, but after the Pipkin incident, I was leery of applying the Foolproof Technique. I googled for alternative Foolproof Techniques, and found an implement called a Tick Twister, which is allegedly the most Foolproof of tick devices out there. It arrived in the post today.

The trick is to slide the prongs under the tick, each side of its head, and then keep twisting till it lets go. This tick had got so fat on Broccles’s blood that I could barely wedge the thing under it, but in the end it was jammed in and I twisted the handle. Out came the tick, head and all – bish, bash, bosh. Tick Twister 1, Foolproof Technique 0. Broccles did a little frolic.

I have an exam in two days. It could be argued that I should be studying instead of writing blog entries about ticks. Then again, it could be argued that this counts as revision,* since my exam is on animal physiology, and I will need to use my knowledge of ticks in it. Here are some things I will need to know.

• A tick has turquoise blood. Red blood takes its colour from the iron used to transport oxygen, but a tick’s blood uses copper, and so its blood is turquoise.
• A tick has no veins in its body – instead, the turquoise blood washes freely around its organs. Even so, it possesses a heart.
• A tick breathes through holes in its sides. The air passes through structures like bound pages, called book lungs. Covering a tick with Vaseline, as some people do, kills it very slowly by suffocation.
• When a tick dies, the extensor muscles within its exoskeleton relax: it hugs itself.

I didn’t want to feel responsible for the tick’s death. Nor did I want it crawling back over the garden wall to attach itself to our pets again. To resolve this dilemma, I carried it into the field across the main road and released it among the grasses, where it hunkered down among the roots to digest its meal. There’s no way it will cross that road. It’s foolproof.

*Revision – UK term for exam preparation.

Ant Massacre

There was a pitched battle outside our back door this week. It must have been a scene of carnage and confusion, panic and bloodshed – but the first we knew of it was the enormous body count at our feet when we stepped into the garden. Hundreds of ants lay heaped like plague victims around one of the nests there. Hundreds more were scattered in diminishing numbers across the patio.

At first we wondered if the ants had been poisoned. It was some minutes before we were able to identify any ants who were still alive. Part of the reason for this was because they were moving so slowly, and so the eye passed over them without registering them. Once we had noticed one, we began to notice more. There was a mere handful of them, wandering in a dreamlike fashion here and there between the bodies. It would be easy to anthropomorphosise and view them as shocked and exhausted survivors of a disaster. I lay on the ground and examined the scene more closely.

I have spent a lot of time crouching over ant colonies, and have come to recognise some of their behaviours. These survivors we saw were not struggling to walk, and showed no sign of the weakness I’d have expected to see in a poisoned colony. Nor were they milling around or relocating their eggs as they would if they felt under attack. Their antennae were tracking the ground ahead of them, and they paused every few seconds over particular pieces of ground. Ants communicate largely by means of pheromones, and they detect these aromas through their antennae. This behaviour is often to be seen when they are foraging, but these ants weren’t moving in the methodical foraging patterns I am used to seeing. This behaviour was more investigative.

Bunty, who was watching me watching the ants, noticed one emerging from an underground chamber carrying a dead ant. The dead ant was carried some distance from the nest, and dropped on the ground. Other exploring ants ignored this corpse as they ignored the others, and instead continued to follow the invisible tales and signposts written on the ground. Bunty surmised that they might be bringing out their Winter dead.

Depositing the dead

This made a lot of sense to me: the ants have only just emerged from their Winter hibernation. Perhaps they were spring-cleaning the nest. I did think it strange that they weren’t tidying up these corpses by eating them, though. I still wonder about that.

Then I noticed that all of the dead ants had ginger-coloured legs, whereas the live ones, the ones I had seen at this nest last year, had dark brown legs. I am not good at differentiating between ant species, especially as some species have different-looking ants to perform different tasks within a single colony. However, it was a reasonable bet that what we were looking at was the late aftermath of a battle between two colonies.

This was verified further when I saw a foraging brown-legged ant come across a live ginger-legged ant. They locked together, their feet scrabbling for purchase on the patio tile, their abdomens repeatedly curling toward each other in the acid-spraying attack position. The fight did not end until the brown-legged ant suddenly bit the red-legged one in the thorax, causing it to instantly curl into the insect position of death and paralysis.

As with spotting the live ants, once I had seen one fighting pair, my eyes began to register more of them, here and there across the patio. Since the greatest concentration of dead ants was around the nest entrance, I guessed that the red-legged ants had invaded the nest and been repelled, and that the nest inhabitants were now seeking out the final few marauders in order to reduce the possibility of future attacks.

Does that sound like a reasonable hypothesis?

The Secret of the Tortoise

Bunty and I are in Morocco. Last night, we slept in a tent surrounded by fruit trees and palms and jasmine, and crickets and stars. The tent stands in a garden called Manzil la Tortue – the Secret of the Tortoise.

We now understand what makes it secret. To find it, we drove along a long, long dirt track, past tiny hamlets of ramshackle houses where all the villagers were sitting out under the stars at their Ramadan feasts. Fearing we were lost, we stopped at a shop the size of a wardrobe, and I got out of the car and asked the three men outside its door for directions. They spoke no English and I had not managed to bone up on French or Arabic, but somehow, with a lot of laughter and a hastily-sketched map, we managed to communicate with each other.

I awoke bright and early, having slept through the muezzin’s call to prayer that woke Bunty in the dark hours. The air was still fresh and laden with jasmine, and I wandered out to explore the grounds. I found three different species of ant, an array of pill bugs, a fly, and three species of songbird. A man raking flower-heads out of the pool greeted me.

“Bonjour”, I replied.

I was bonjoured soon afterward by the camp site guard, a man wearing the long djellaba and pointed yellow slippers seen all over Morocco; and a woman, also in a djellaba, who passed me in a covered avenue of white bougainvillea.

“Bonjour.”

“Ca va?”

A bee the size of a quail egg buzzed around my purple tunic. It was black and white and red – very striking – but it didn’t stay still for long enough for me to phtograph it.

I rounded a corner and found this rabbit enclosure.

I love that they are free to dig and socialise, and have burrows. I was surprised to see that they had been given a large number of orange halves to feed on, and had clearly appreciated them very much. I must try Broccles with an orange one sunny day.

Then I stumbled upon the chooks who will be providing my breakfast eggs a few minutes from now. They look alert and happy too. No battery hens, these.