Tick Bite

This tiny black-legged tick has burrowed into a person’s skin using its razor-sharp mouthparts. Ticks are parasites that survive by drinking other animals’ blood. If not removed, this tick will swell up like a balloon as it feeds!

To find a meal, a tick hangs out on a bush or tall grass. It waves its front legs in the air. Organs on its legs can sense an animal’s body heat and detect chemicals in its potential victim’s sweat and breath. Then the tick grabs onto the animal’s body and digs into its flesh to slurp up blood.

Most of the time, people and other animals don’t even notice a tick is biting them. That’s because a tick’s “saliva has a numbing agent that prevents you from feeling the tick’s bite,” says Allison Gardner, a medical entomologist at the University of Maine. She studies how insects and arachnids—a class of animals that includes ticks and spiders—transmit disease. When ticks bite a host, they can pass on dangerous bacteria that cause illnesses like Lyme disease. This condition often causes a bull’s-eye-shaped rash, headache, joint pain, and fatigue.

Don’t avoid the outdoors for fear of ticks, though, says Gardner. You can protect yourself from these tiny bloodsuckers by wearing insect repellent and checking your body for tiny hitchhikers once you return home. If you do find a tick mid-bite, slowly pull it out with tweezers and clean the bite with alcohol. Removing a tick as soon as possible lowers the chance of it transmitting a disease.