Growing Ticks

Ticks are one of the most significant vectors of infectious disease in the world, responsible for transmitting, most famously, Lyme disease, but also anaplasmosis, Powassan virus and more. And it isn’t just humans that suffer. Tick-borne illnesses also affect animals including cattle, which can have significant economic impact on farmers. Scientists are investigating these blood suckers in the hope of developing repellents, disease treatments and vaccines, and to do so they need a steady supply of ticks and, therefore, blood – these days, often provided by synthetic tick-feeding systems. The one pictured shows fully engorged Haemaphysalis longicornis ticks, native to Asia, and consists of a thin silicone membrane mimicking skin above a supply of, in this case, bovine blood. These systems enable the feeding and full reproductive cycle of ticks with the advantage of being cheaper, less variable and more ethical than the alternative method: using live animal hosts.

Written by Ruth Williams

Ruth Williams

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Ruth is a freelance science journalist based in the US. She's a regular correspondent for The Scientist, and her work has appeared in The Lancet, Nature, Scientific American Mind, BBC Focus and elsewhere. Twitter @rooph

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• Image from work by Abdul Ghafar and colleagues
• Department of Veterinary Biosciences, Melbourne Veterinary School, The University of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in The Veterinary Journal, February 2026