“I would feel a lot more comfortable,” Ostfeld answered, “if I knew that the landscape would support healthy populations of owls, foxes, hawks, weasels, squirrels of various kinds—the components of the community that could regulate mouse populations.” In other words, biological diversity. This was his offhand way of expressing the most notable conclusion that has emerged from twenty years of research: Risk of Lyme disease seems to go up as the roster of native animals, in a given area, goes down.
