Will ticks be worse this year after another mild winter in the Lehigh Valley?

Monday night, cradled by the La-Z-Boy couch, I was in that near-dream state where you’re staring at your phone one minute, drifting off the next.

Our 14-year-old emerged from his room triumphant to show me the Lego Technic car he’d just finished, the kind where you can turn a dial to steer the front wheels and the rear wheels turn a camshaft that makes the pistons pop under the hood.

I was impressed but became suddenly aware of discomfort on my left lower abdomen.

“Is this a tick, can you see?” I asked him, and it was — embedded pretty deeply, and now the cause of some frantic running around the house and clawing at it with tweezers before finally waking my wife to check and make sure I’d gotten it all. (Bless her, she used her fingernails to get some bits I’d failed to extract.)

After another mild winter, are we in for a year of bolstered tick populations, I wondered. In between a trip to urgent care Wednesday morning for a single dose of the antibiotic doxycycline to hopefully ward off any chance of contracting Lyme disease, I reached out to some experts to get their take.

Turns out, while a colder winter can cut down on the number of ticks that survive to spring, a mild winter doesn’t necessarily mean there are going to be more ticks lurking in forest and glade, not to mention some backyards, the experts said.

What is clear is the tick season is upon us, and there are ways to protect yourself and loved ones from the threat of tick-borne disease.

“It is reasonable to believe that the tick populations will be the same as in previous years,” Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection spokesman Neil Shader told lehighvalleylive.com in response to my inquiry. “The adult deer ticks are active throughout the winter and will be into the spring.

“Along with the adult deer ticks, we expect to see the emergence of the nymphal life stage of the deer tick beginning in April with their activity peaking in June and July. It is this life stage that is most implicated with the transmission of Lyme Disease and other tick-borne pathogens due to their extremely small size.”

The adult deer, or blacklegged, tick is about as small as a sesame seed, and the nymph is the size of a poppyseed, according to the lymediseaseassociation.org.

They can easily evade tick checks that are nevertheless important during and after outdoor activity. They can also hitchhike home on a dog and find their way to you on the La-Z-Boy. (Not blaming our dog Jerry here, but he was definitely on the couch with me just prior to Monday night’s discovery after walks the prior two afternoons at Salisbury Township’s Franko and Walking Purchase parks.)

For an arthropod, ticks can live a pretty long time — up to two years, according to Emily Struckhoff, vector-borne disease program specialist with the Penn State Extension in University Park, Pennsylvania.

So what a mild winter might mean is that ticks can be active outside of the warmer months.

“They can be out searching for something to bite anytime the temperature is above about 40 degrees or so,” Struckhoff told me.

The statistics bear out that we just finished another mild Lehigh Valley winter. Temperatures during the climatological winter from December 2023 through February 2024 averaged 3.1 degrees Fahrenheit above normal, according to National Weather Service data.

Snow-wise, our official total for the fall and winter through February totaled 25.2 inches, which was pretty close to normal — just 1.1 inches shy of what we should see for that timeframe, according to NWS meteorologist Michael Silva. The year before, the official Lehigh Valley 2022-23 snowfall totaled a paltry 6.3 inches.

The DEP cites studies that show only around 20% of the tick population die off in colder winters. What can take its toll is when a winter features a relative abundance of changes from warm to very cold seem, according to the department: “The applied rationale is that warmer temperatures lure ticks to the forest surface or onto vegetation, and the quick onset of cold then kills them before they can reach safe-haven in soil or leaf litter.”

A tick will spend about 95% of its life down in the soil and leaf litter, the Penn State Extension’s Struckhoff said.

“It’s when we have these warmer days that they come out,” she said.

In April, the DEP and its grant-funded county partners will begin statewide tick surveys, according to Shader, the department spokesman. This survey aims to track the expansion of invasive ticks, as well as targeting nymphal deer ticks. The nymphs will be tested for pathogens that cause human illness including Lyme disease.

The mildness of winter potentially linked to climate change in general could lead to earlier emergence of some of the invasive ticks that Pennsylvania is home to, such as the Asian longhorned tick, Shader said. Like blacklegged or deer ticks, Asian longhorned ticks have been collected from the environment in Pennsylvania that were positive for the causative agents of Lyme disease and anaplasmosis.

Both of these illnesses can cause early signs and symptoms like fever, chills, headache, fatigue, and muscle or joint aches. Later complications of anaplasmosis can be life-threatening. A Lyme infection left untreated can spread to joints, the heart and the nervous system.

Ticks cause other illnesses like Powassan virus that can be transmitted in as little as 15 minutes after tick attachment and Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, which can be rapidly fatal if not treated within the first five days after symptoms occur. An infection of Babesiosis spread by deer ticks can range from asymptomatic to life-threatening. Ehrlichiosis is spread by deer ticks and lone star ticks and causes fever, chills, headache, muscle aches and sometimes upset stomach. And the list of problems goes on, including the meat allergy alpha-gal syndrome that is caused by tick spit.

“It is imperative that people take precautions when enjoying the outdoors to limit their contact with ticks,” Shader said, offering up the following suggestions to reduce the risk of coming in contact with ticks and contracting tick-borne illnesses:

• Use permethrin spray on clothing (good for 6 washes) to kill ticks.
• Use repellent containing DEET or others approved by U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
• Wear light-colored clothing.
• Tuck shirts into pants and pants into socks.
• Perform regular tick checks while in the field.
• Walk in the center of trails away from edge vegetation.
• Check yourself and pets for ticks when arriving home.
• Put clothes in the dryer on high heat.
• Shower after coming home.
• Remove any ticks that are attached as soon as possible.

Visit dep.pa.gov to learn more ticks in Pennsylvania. For tick-borne diseases/conditions and additional information in New Jersey, visit nj.gov.

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Kurt Bresswein may be reached at kbresswein@lehighvalleylive.com.