The loss of species diversity in northeastern forests of the United States similarly allowed tickborne pathogens to spill over into humans. In the original, intact northeastern forests, a diversity of woodland animals such as chipmunks, weasels, and opossums abounded. These creatures imposed a limit on the local tick population, for a single opossum, through grooming, destroyed nearly six thousand ticks a week. But as the suburbs grew in the Northeast, the forest was fragmented into little wooded plots crisscrossed by roads and highways. Specialist species like opossums, chipmunks, and weasels
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