BOZEMAN - When a Montana woman discovered an unusual looking tick on her dog, she submitted it to a research lab where they soon discovered that this was a type of tick that had never been confirmed in Montana.
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Mel and Kim Kotur were petting their dog Maisie after a hunting trip in eastern Montana when they felt something in her fur.
“I was petting her and just felt something on there. At first I thought maybe it was hounds’ tongue or some kind of weed seed, and turns out looking at it, it was a tick,” said Mel Kotur.
“It was right on her collar, on the front of her neck,” said Kim.
When the Koturs discovered the tick, they noticed it didn’t look like the ticks they’re used to seeing.
“You know, being outside a lot, we’ve seen a lot of ticks. They’ve all been wood ticks; this one just looked a little different,” said Mel.
What the Koturs didn’t know at the time was that they had found the first documented Black Legged Tick, commonly called the deer tick, in Montana.
Until this point, the tick has only been seen as far west as north-central North Dakota; this is now the first known tick in Montana that can carry Lyme Disease.
“What’s happening is that these ticks might be moving into Montana looking for hosts like a deer maybe in these riparian water corridors and then that’s kind of helping them migrate into the state,” said Marni Rolston, a a Lab Diagnostician at the MSU Schutter Lab.
The lab mainly focuses on plants, but they also work to identify ticks.
Deer ticks are much smaller than the usual kinds of ticks found in Montana.
“The nymphal stage can be small; it’s about only as large as a poppyseed and then the adult stages are a bit larger. But they’re still pretty small compared to our normal ticks. The adult stages tend to be the size of a sesame seed,” said Rolston.
While these ticks can carry Lyme Disease, not all of them have it. The ticks must be infected by another Lyme disease-carrying animal to keep spreading the disease.
Luckily, infection doesn’t happen immediately.
“It needs to blood feed for at least 24 hours before it can transmit the disease to you. So you have 24 hours to try and find these ticks once they’ve attached to you,” said Rolston.
The Koturs always take extra precaution when going on their hunting trips, using sprays and special clothing made for warding off ticks.
“So you put that over your socks and you put that over the outside, and the ticks crawl up and get stuck in there and they come all the way up your leg,” said Kim.
Ticks are most present in the early summer months, but deer ticks may extend this time period.
