When Appalachian State biology professor Steve Seagle drags for ticks near the Boone Greenway Trail, he has a pretty good sense of what he’ll find.
“It’s almost certainly going to be a blacklegged tick,” he said.
The blacklegged tick, or deer tick, is a known carrier of the bacteria responsible for Lyme disease, and it’s a relative newcomer to the North Carolina Blue Ridge. About a decade ago, Seagle said the tick species was much harder to find in the state.
“I can’t say there were not any,” he said. “They really were not here, in not in any high density.”
That’s been changing in the past few years, however, as the tick’s range has spread both north into Canada and south into western North Carolina, and with them, a spike in Lyme cases. The highest concentration of cases is in the northwest corner of the state, around the Blue Ridge Mountains.
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“That’s not something a lot of people are used to thinking about,” Seagle said.