In the summer of 2013, Rebekah Taylor’s 4-year-old son, Jack, went on a camping trip with his grandfather in Rocky Gap State Park in Western Maryland and came home with a bug bite on his ankle. A day or two later, he got a fever and felt sluggish. It could have been a mosquito bite, Taylor thought. His pediatrician thought it was from a spider.
About a week after that, Jack came off the field at soccer camp and complained his knees hurt and he felt tired. Later that night, when Taylor took his shirt off to bathe him, she was shocked to see little pink rings — about the size of a golf ball — all over his torso.
Then she examined the bug bite on his leg and saw an even larger, faint pink ring. “Oh my gosh,” she thought. “This is that bull’s eye ring that they talk about with tick bites.”
Jack had Lyme disease — a bacterial illness that can cause fever, joint pain, skin rash and more serious nervous system complications.
Jack took antibiotics and got better, with no serious repercussions, Taylor said. But that tick bite a little more than a decade ago became pivotal for Taylor, an associate professor and department chair of biology at Frostburg State University, shaping her research for years to come.
Advertisement
Taylor was born in Cumberland, a city in Western Maryland, and as a kid, she had never been told to watch out for ticks.
“It wasn’t really something that many people were aware of. Even doctors that I spoke with — it wasn’t a priority on their radar,” Taylor, 44, said in a phone interview. “But then I got curious: Well, clearly they’re here, and clearly they have Lyme. How many are here? And how many are carrying Lyme? And maybe other people should know about this.”
Scientists had previously studied Lyme bacteria-carrying ticks in eastern Maryland and southwestern Pennsylvania, but the last known study in western Maryland at the time was in the 1990s, according to Taylor’s team, and it found no Lyme bacteria-positive ticks in Allegany County, where Rocky Gap State Park and Frostburg State University are located.
Advertisement
Taylor and her students at Frostburg began their research in 2016, when one of her graduate students spent the summer in Rocky Gap State Park dragging the forest floor with a cloth to capture blacklegged ticks — also called deer ticks, after their preferred host — and setting live-animal box traps to capture rodents. More than a fifth of the 151 ticks captured tested positive for Borrelia burgdorferi, the bacteria that causes Lyme disease in humans. Of the 65 rodents caught — field mice, voles and eastern chipmunks — 12 carried the bacteria.
Word of her discovery got around. Area residents began asking Taylor about her research, and park rangers started to warn visitors to watch out for ticks. So Taylor expanded the scope of her team’s work — by crowdsourcing for ticks. “Instead of me and my students combing the forests of Maryland for ticks, maybe we could ask the public of Maryland to help,” she said. She asked the public to start mailing her the bugs, with the dates and places they were found.
Her first Facebook post soliciting ticks from the region was in March 2017. People have been mailing her ticks ever since: “The only thing that has changed is that I no longer accept live ticks,” she said. “They must be dead to protect the safety of postal workers.”
Advertisement
Her team has tested 257 ticks, sent in from 2017 to 2020, for the Lyme bacteria, and 40 percent of them were positive. About 200 other ticks, sent from 2021 to present, are in the team’s freezer, waiting to be tested.
Taylor hasn’t kept track of how many people have mailed in ticks, but she does have loyal tick hunters.
“There is one woman in Cumberland who regularly sends us dozens of ticks at a time, all taped to a sheet of paper from her cat named Duck,” Taylor wrote in an email. “I guess that makes Duck an integral part of our research program!”
Experts say climate change has contributed to the expansion of the geographic range of ticks, increasing the risk of Lyme disease. According to surveillance data reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the MidAtlantic has the most Lyme cases of any region in the United States. Each year, there are approximately 30,000 reported cases — though experts say there is substantial underreporting. In 2021, there were more than 900 cases reported in Maryland.
Taylor’s research continues to expand. She and one of her students have launched a project with the Nature Conservancy in Bethesda to see how a controlled burn on land at Sideling Hill Creek preserve in Allegany County impacted tick populations. They collected more than 500 ticks in the summers of 2020 and 2021, and their analysis is just now wrapping up, she said.
And in a collaboration with scientists at the University of California at Berkeley and the nonprofit BSCS Science Learning, her team’s findings now live online at TickTalk as part of FieldScope — a platform to help communities and citizens collect and make sense of data by creating maps and graphs. TickTalk officially went live in October.
Advertisement
“Users might start off by just being curious if ticks have been analyzed from their neighborhood, and if those ticks were positive for Lyme disease,” said Jessica Bean, a project scientist at Berkeley who is FieldScope’s director of outreach and science. “We expect that the community will continue to build this database and that these data will help communities to think about the connections between public health and climate change, and lead to actions that are necessary.”
Taylor, who shares her findings in community talks with garden clubs and other groups, says she’s now known as “the tick lady.” One member of her audience was Sarah Milbourne, western region manager for the Maryland Park Service. It was Milbourne who connected Taylor with Bean and helped make TickTalk happen.
And now ticks are a key part of Milbourne’s talks with park visitors.
Advertisement
“I’d been looking for the thing I can speak to that will turn people on to climate change. We don’t have sea level rise [in the mountains of western Maryland] … What is the thing that climate is impacting especially in western Maryland that I can build messaging around?” Milbourne said.
“And it came to me like a bolt of lightning. I remembered the talk by Rebekah: That’s the thing they care about because of disease, because of Lyme, because of other tick-borne illnesses,” she said. “It’s like polar bears. It’s something that’s happening that’s near and dear and really matters to people.”
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7uK3SoaCnn6Sku7G70q1lnKedZLGkecydZK%2BZX2d9c4COaWhoaGdkwaqvyqxkpbGdmnqltdKemKydXZu%2FsL%2FTm6yrn12owaLAxGasp6Gmmr%2B0tdOyZg%3D%3D