The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet

by Jeff Goodell

But in Bente’s view, the most worrisome development in TickWorld is the invasion of Asian longhorned ticks in the US, which he calls “a cautionary tale.” Nobody is quite sure how or when the first Asian longhorned tick (Haemaphysalis longicornis) arrived in the continental US. They are native to East Asia, including Australia and New Zealand. They were first reported in 2017, in New Jersey. Within a year, researchers had found the tick in eight other states, and its territory continues to expand as the climate warms and winters grow milder. One key contributor to its rapid spread is the fact that females can reproduce through cloning themselves, without the need for mating, a process called parthenogenesis. This makes it extremely hard to control.