#ticks

There's a book you might like called Venomous by Christie Wilcox. It's amazing.

Basically, venom is insanely complex. It's not just a toxic substance, even the simplest venom has dozens of different components specially adapted to mess with your cells in some way. "Poison" is just something that hurts you, "venom" is a highly sophisticated bioweapon.

The reason for this complexity is evolutionary: it's easy for a species to evolve immunity to just one of the components in venom, so the species has to evolve lots and lots of new components to outpace the evolution of resistance.

You're right on the money with medical applications. Venom is an incredible source of potential drugs because it has so many different components.

I can't recommend that venom straight from the bug be used for medicinal applications, since, as I just said, there are dozens or even hundreds of different components in there that affect you in all different ways, but yes, people have intentionally stung themselves with bees to self-treat chronic pain and stuff.

Venom can also have weird effects on your immune system and your body overall that we don't understand anything about. Lots of anecdotes of people saying they were cured of their this-or-that after being stung by a bunch of bees.

There is probably some truth to it because venom is full of stuff that evolved specifically to affect your cells, and it's not that weird to suppose that occasionally that effect could be a positive one. But it seems equally plausible that other people have gotten mysterious ailments from venom too, for the exact same reasons.

Worth noting that the more bee stings you have in your life, the more likely you are to develop an allergy to bee venom. So watch out!

Yes, when a tick bites you, its saliva gets in your body which is how Alpha-gal happens: with lone star tick there is a component in the saliva which your body can have an immune reaction to, causing you to become allergic (sometimes anaphylactic level allergy) to red meat.

Which is similar to a vaccine, superficially, it's causing your body to recognize something as a threat and have an immune response to it. It's just not beneficial to you and is in fact quite harmful.

Ticks perform the ecosystem service of redistributing nutrients from larger organisms into smaller ones. A tick bites a large animal, takes some of its blood, falls off, and can then be eaten by a smaller animal. It's almost like the food chain moves "backwards", where nutrients flow from larger organisms into smaller ones.

It's actually really cool, how a deer can become food for spiders and ants and wasps and lizards through being bitten by a tick and that tick being eaten by a much smaller creature.

As for the behaviors of wasps and why they might be attracted to the powdery mildew, who knows? Fungi, insects, and plants all communicate with each other in complex ways. Here's a couple papers suggesting that powdery mildew has an effect on wasps, but weirdly, the effect in these papers is opposite: parasitoid wasps are less attracted to plants with powdery mildew, possibly because the powdery mildew affects the plant's ability to release chemicals to attract wasps to parasitize caterpillars eating them.

You could try identifying the wasps, at least on a general level, and investigate further. It's worth keeping a little journal to record your observations of interactions between organisms.

I took a beekeeping class a while back and honeybees are SO well studied, like there are THOUSANDS of papers on them, and yet, there is still SO much we do not know about honeybees. And there are thousands of other social insects that have few or even NO papers on them. The amount we don't know about wasps is probably absolutely mind-boggling.

Fact is, insects that are not "economically important" are barely studied at all, even though many fascinating secrets lie within their biology and ecology.

Climate change is pushing ticks into new habitats across southern Canada, and experts say the blood-sucking pests will keep advancing. Disease-carrying ticks were barely on Canada's radar until the 1990s, but scientists say various species are travelling north from the United States at a rate of 35 to 55 kilometres per year. "Where the vast majority of the Canadian population lives, which is near the American border, are all in areas that are already climatically suitable for tick populations," said Katie Clow, an assistant professor in the department of population medicine at the University of Guelph. "Likely, the invasion process is just going to continue to sort of fill that ecological niche." Clow says parts of southern Canada that do not yet have ticks will likely see them emerge over the coming decade.

Read more.

Like I’ll be scrolling and there’s Grace in all of his buffoonery and if you look to the left you just see

Endangered species come in all shapes and sizes; one often overlooked species is the Ryukyu rabbit tick. This species is endemic to only one island off the coast of southern Japan, and is one of the rarest parasites in the world. Adults feed exclusively on the equally rare and endangered amami rabbit, whose population has been in decline due to the introduction of mongoose and feral dogs on the island. Because of its rarity, the Ryukyu rabbit tick has become something of a flagship species for endangered 'uncharismatic fauna', as an example that you don't need to be cute and cuddly to be worth saving!