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According to Ur. David Gaines, epidemiologist and tick tracker for the Virginia Department of Health, here is how the story unfolds.
White-footed mice are quite common in forested areas and the main meal ticket for the black-legged tick, commonly known as the deer tick.
When larval ticks feed on infected mice, they turn into infected nymphal ticks - the primary link between Lyme disease and humans.
Here enters the white-tailed deer, also lovers of the forest and accomplices for spreading Lyme. The adult tick prefers deer blood to that of the white-footed mouse, so it transfers vehicles and motors out. The faster paced deer allows adult ticks to lay its eggs in far away lands.
Here enters the bulldozers. Also lovers of forests, they chop, chop, chop down trees, opening forests up to suburban sprawling. This “fragmented forest” is a happy home to deer because of the plentiful food. In fact, deer thrive there.
Unlucky for people, the infected white-footed mouse likes to sprawl along with dozers, houses and deer - the latter wiping out grass, honeysuckle, Rappahannians gardens, etc., along the way.
And so, Lyme-infected ticks have been meandering slowly from New England to Virginia aboard the white-tailed deer/white-footed mouse express for several decades. In fact, Virginia appears to be dividing the Lyme-heavy north from the Lyme-light south, making our Commonwealth a type of “Mason-Dixon Lyme line.”
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