Limited detection of shared zoonotic pathogens in deer keds and blacklegged ticks co-parasitizing white-tailed deer in the eastern United States
This video abstract is part of the Neglected Bacterial Diseases Special Issue published in Medical and Veterinary Entomology in May 2023. Read the full article, open access, here.
European deer keds and blacklegged ticks feed on white-tailed deer. They can be found on this host at the same time and in similar regions of the deer’s body. This led our group to wonder whether deer keds and ticks collected from the same deer might harbor similar bacterial pathogens. We examined paired deer keds-ticks from 38 white-tailed deer in Pennsylvania, and we detected only a limited number of shared pathogens. In this paper the authors discuss details of their results in the context of our sampling approach, the feeding strategy of these ectoparasites, and the impact that the season in which we sampled may have had on our observations.
