The research, led by Mariachiara Vardeu and Elena Ghiorzi of the University of Padua together with colleagues at the University of Pavia, was conceived around a central weakness in the existing literature: most tick microbiome studies choose a decontamination method by convention rather than by evidence. Ethanol washes, bleach treatments, and commercial DNA-degrading reagents all appear in published workflows, but until now there has been no direct, controlled comparison of how effectively each removes surface-associated bacteria while preserving the tick’s internal microbial community. Without such a benchmark, differences between laboratories could reflect cleaning chemistry as much as genuine biology, undermining efforts to compare microbiome data across studies, regions, or tick populations.

To build that benchmark, the team designed an elegant experimental trick. Rather than relying on the unknown and variable bacteria naturally present on wild-caught ticks, they deliberately contaminated adult Ixodes ricinus ticks and nymphs with a defined bacterial mock community of known composition. This meant that the researchers knew exactly which bacterial sequences represented surface contamination and could track, with precision, how much of that signal survived each cleaning treatment. Any mock-community reads remaining after decontamination were, by definition, residual surface contamination; any reduction in those reads measured the effectiveness of the protocol. It is a simple idea in principle, but one that transforms decontamination from a matter of faith into a measurable quantity.

The contaminated ticks were then subjected to five decontamination regimens: a wash in 70% ethanol, the traditional mainstay of tick microbiome studies; a 1% bleach treatment; DNA/RNA Zap, a commercial reagent that degrades nucleic acids on external surfaces; and two combination protocols in which a lysozyme pre-treatment, designed to weaken bacterial cell walls, was followed by either bleach or DNA/RNA Zap. Mock-inoculated ticks that received no decontamination served as controls. After cleaning, the researchers characterized the microbial communities using Oxford Nanopore full-length 16S rRNA gene sequencing, a platform that reads the entire bacterial barcoding gene rather than short fragments, providing higher taxonomic resolution for identifying which bacteria survived which treatment.

The results were striking in their clarity. Ethanol, the most widely used decontamination agent in the field, consistently showed the weakest effect, leaving substantial mock-community signal intact and suggesting that many published tick microbiome profiles built on ethanol-washed specimens may carry a meaningful contribution from surface bacteria. By contrast, both bleach and DNA/RNA Zap, whether applied alone or preceded by lysozyme, produced near-complete depletion of the mock-community reads. In other words, the two harsher chemical approaches came closest to erasing the experimental contamination signal, while the gentler ethanol wash barely dented it. Perhaps unexpectedly, the enzymatic lysozyme pre-treatment conferred no measurable advantage over bleach or DNA/RNA Zap used on their own, a finding that simplifies protocol design and removes an unnecessary step from future workflows.

Effectiveness at removing contaminants is only half the story, however. An ideal decontamination protocol must also preserve the tick’s genuine internal microbiota, including endosymbionts that play roles in tick nutrition and reproduction, and any pathogens the tick may harbor. To probe this dimension, the team compared sequencing results from tick legs, which are dominated by surface-associated microbes, with leg-free bodies, which contain the internal organs and their resident communities. This anatomical dissection revealed that Brevibacterium, a bacterial genus frequently reported in tick studies, was predominantly surface-associated in this system, raising the possibility that some taxa previously interpreted as tick symbionts may in fact be exoskeletal passengers. Meanwhile, the endosymbiont Candidatus Midichloria, a bacterium closely associated with Ixodes ticks, remained readily detectable in leg-free bodies even after decontamination, indicating that the effective treatments stripped the surface without erasing the tick’s true internal signature.

The preservation of pathogen signals was equally reassuring. In nymphs that had been experimentally infected with Borrelia, the causative agent of Lyme disease, Borrelia-associated sequences remained readily detectable following surface treatment. This matters enormously for disease surveillance, because ticks are routinely screened for Borrelia and other pathogens using molecular methods, and a decontamination protocol aggressive enough to destroy pathogen DNA would compromise those assays. The study’s findings suggest that bleach- and DNA/RNA Zap-based protocols occupy a valuable middle ground: strong enough to eliminate exoskeletal contamination, yet gentle enough to leave internal microbial and pathogen signals intact and quantifiable.

Beyond the head-to-head protocol comparison, the study also explored how decontamination choice shapes community-level diversity analyses, the statistical frameworks ecologists use to compare microbiomes across samples. These analyses suggested treatment-associated differences in the bacterial profiles recovered from the ticks, hinting that laboratories using different cleaning methods may not be sampling quite the same biological reality. The authors are careful to frame these diversity patterns as exploratory rather than definitive, but the implication is clear: decontamination is not a neutral technical detail but an active variable that can shift the apparent composition of a tick’s microbiome, potentially confounding meta-analyses that pool data from studies using different protocols.

The authors are equally candid about the limits of their benchmark. The mock-community approach, while powerful, was tested under controlled laboratory conditions with a defined and relatively simple surface community. Real ticks collected in the field carry more diverse and unevenly distributed microbial loads, and different tick species present different exoskeleton chemistries and sizes that could influence how reagents penetrate and perform. Validation using field-collected ticks, additional tick species, more complex surface-associated microbial communities, and independent laboratory settings will be required before the community can propose broader methodological standardization. The researchers also emphasize that the optimal decontamination strategy may depend on the biological compartment and microbial fraction of interest, meaning that a one-size-fits-all protocol may never exist.

Nevertheless, the study delivers an immediately actionable message for anyone working on tick microbiomes or tick-borne pathogen surveillance. Under the conditions tested, bleach and DNA/RNA Zap produced the strongest reduction in experimentally introduced surface bacteria while preserving dominant tick-associated taxa and pathogen sequences, whereas ethanol, the field’s default choice, performed worst. Lysozyme pre-treatment added nothing measurable. For a research community racing to understand how tick microbiomes influence vector competence and disease transmission across a changing European landscape, this quantitative framework arrives at an opportune moment. By making surface decontamination a benchmarked, comparable step rather than an unexamined habit, the Padua-led team has taken a meaningful step toward microbiome data that can be trusted, compared, and built upon, and toward a clearer picture of what really lives inside one of Europe’s most medically important arthropods.

Subject of Research: Benchmarking surface decontamination protocols for tick microbiome profiling using 16S rRNA sequencing

Article Title: Benchmarking surface decontamination methods for reliable Ixodes ricinus microbiome profiling

Article References: Benchmarking surface decontamination methods for reliable Ixodes ricinus microbiome profiling. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1186/s13071-026-07726-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s13071-026-07726-1

Keywords: Ixodes ricinus, tick microbiome, surface decontamination, 16S rRNA sequencing, Oxford Nanopore, mock community, Borrelia, Midichloria, Brevibacterium, Lyme disease, vector competence, Parasites & Vectors

The study, published in the journal Parasites & Vectors, exploits a regulatory quirk that most surveillance systems can only dream of. Unlike passive reporting schemes, which depend on farmers choosing to notify disease, the Imizol notification requirement captures treatment events systematically, because compliance is mandated whenever the drug is used. Between 2016 and 2024, these notifications provided a proxy dataset for clinically recognised bovine babesiosis at a resolution fine enough to map disease presence onto a grid of two-kilometre squares covering Great Britain. The disease itself is caused by protozoan parasites of the genus Babesia, transmitted by ticks, with the sheep tick Ixodes ricinus serving as the principal vector in the British Isles. Infected cattle can develop fever, anaemia, red urine and, in severe cases, death, making early detection and treatment critical for herd health and farm economics.

To transform the notification records into a predictive map, the team turned to machine learning, specifically boosted regression trees, a method that excels at capturing complex, nonlinear relationships between environmental variables and disease occurrence. The predictor variables fell into four broad categories. Seasonal climate metrics characterised temperature and moisture conditions across the year. Vegetation greenness, derived from satellite observations, served as a proxy for habitat quality and tick-friendly landscapes. Livestock densities captured the availability of hosts on which ticks could feed. Finally, the researchers included predicted habitat suitability for three species of deer, red, roe and fallow, which act as key reproductive hosts for adult Ixodes ricinus ticks and are known to shape tick population dynamics across British landscapes.

The modelling strategy was deliberately rigorous. Models were trained on notification data from southwest England, a recognised hotspot for the disease, using records from 2016 to 2022. They were then temporally validated against data from the same region for 2023 and 2024, testing whether the models could anticipate disease patterns in years they had never seen. Crucially, the models were also evaluated externally against independent notification data from outside the training region, a demanding test of whether the relationships learned in one part of Britain could transfer to environments elsewhere on the island.

The results were striking. In internal cross-validation, the models achieved a mean area under the receiver operating characteristic curve, or AUC, of 0.81, with a mean correlation of 0.55, indicating strong discrimination between areas with and without notified cases. Temporal validation yielded a continuous Boyce Index of 0.81, confirming that the models reliably ranked habitat suitability in unseen years. External validation outside southwest England produced a Boyce Index of 0.58, suggesting moderate transferability, a respectable figure for a disease model extrapolated beyond its training domain. For a condition that has historically lacked any systematic national mapping, these performance metrics represent a substantial advance in the epidemiology of bovine babesiosis.

Perhaps the most revealing findings concerned which variables actually drove the predicted patterns. Climatic predictors accounted for the greatest relative influence by a wide margin, with autumn cooling alone contributing a mean relative influence of 37.3 percent and atmospheric moisture adding a further 8.5 percent. This dominance of autumnal temperature decline aligns closely with the ecology of Ixodes ricinus, whose activity depends on specific thermal and humidity windows. Ticks in Britain typically show peaks of questing activity in spring and autumn, and the timing and intensity of autumn cooling appears to constrain how long ticks remain active late in the season, shaping the window during which cattle can be exposed to infected bites.

Among the non-climatic predictors, habitat suitability for roe deer and sheep density emerged as the most influential factors, each contributing moderate explanatory power, while vegetation greenness exerted a smaller effect. The prominence of roe deer is ecologically coherent: deer of this species are widespread across woodland and fragmented rural landscapes in Britain and serve as efficient hosts for adult ticks, amplifying tick populations in areas where they thrive. Sheep density, meanwhile, may reflect both the presence of additional hosts and the movement of livestock between farms, which can transport ticks and, in some contexts, the parasites themselves. Notably, the proportional land-cover variables that are staples of many landscape epidemiology studies showed consistently low individual influence, suggesting that the composition of habitat types matters less for this disease than the climatic and host-related conditions that govern tick survival and abundance.

Beyond its ecological insights, the study carries immediate practical value for British agriculture. The risk maps generated by the models can help anticipate areas of elevated babesiosis risk and guide disease surveillance at regional scales. Of particular interest are the locations where environmental conditions appear suitable for disease occurrence but treated cases have not yet been reported. Such mismatches between predicted suitability and observed notifications may indicate genuine gaps in surveillance, under-recognition of disease by veterinarians, or areas where the disease is emerging as conditions change. Identifying these frontier zones allows veterinary authorities and farmers to target awareness campaigns, diagnostic efforts and tick control measures before outbreaks become established.

The research also demonstrates a methodological lesson with implications far beyond a single disease. Mandatory veterinary medicines notification data, the authors show, can serve as a credible proxy for disease occurrence at national scale, opening a surveillance channel that exists independently of voluntary reporting. Many countries maintain compulsory reporting requirements for the use of specific veterinary drugs, and the British experience suggests these records can be mined for spatial epidemiology at little additional cost. As climate change alters the seasonal rhythms of temperature and moisture across Europe, the activity patterns of Ixodes ricinus and the diseases it carries are expected to shift, making robust, repeatable mapping systems increasingly valuable.

For British cattle farmers, the message is that the geography of babesiosis risk is now legible in unprecedented detail, and that the levers shaping that geography are largely environmental: the coolness of autumn, the dampness of the air, the abundance of roe deer in the surrounding woods and the density of sheep grazing nearby fields. The work, funded through a University of Liverpool PhD studentship in partnership with the Animal and Plant Health Agency and supported by the BBSRC-DEFRA OPTICK project, exemplifies how collaboration between academic modellers and government surveillance units can convert routine regulatory data into actionable ecological intelligence. As warming winters and shifting rainfall patterns continue to redraw the map of tick-borne disease across the British Isles, studies of this kind provide the baseline against which future change will be measured, and the tools with which farmers and veterinarians can stay one step ahead of a parasite that thrives in the margins of the season.

Subject of Research: Spatial modelling of bovine babesiosis risk in Great Britain using mandatory imidocarb treatment notifications and machine learning

Article Title: Climate, host and landscape determinants of bovine babesiosis in Great Britain: analysis of Imidocarb treatment notifications, 2016–2024

Article References: Shanks, S., Duncan, J., Johnson, N., Millins, C., Hassall, R., & Purse, B. V. (2026). Climate, host and landscape determinants of bovine babesiosis in Great Britain: analysis of Imidocarb treatment notifications, 2016–2024. Parasites & Vectors. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13071-026-07665-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s13071-026-07665-x

Keywords: bovine babesiosis, Ixodes ricinus, tick-borne disease, imidocarb dipropionate, machine learning, boosted regression trees, climate determinants, roe deer, sheep density, Great Britain, veterinary surveillance, risk mapping

Researchers at the University of Liverpool, working with Richard Wall of the University of Bristol, carried out an extraordinarily intensive sampling campaign at Lyme Park in northern England. Every month from January to December 2022, the team dragged a fabric blanket across fixed transects at four-hour intervals, completing full 24-hour sampling cycles. This design allowed them, for the first time, to separate seasonal variation in tick activity from daily, or diel, variation, two dimensions of behaviour that previous studies had almost always examined in isolation. Because the sampling rounds captured ticks actively questing, that is, climbing vegetation with outstretched forelegs to ambush passing hosts, the counts represent genuine host-seeking behaviour rather than simple abundance.

The headline finding is that questing activity in I. ricinus is predominantly nocturnal. Densities of host-seeking ticks were highest during the dark hours of the sampling cycle, and statistical modelling confirmed that darkness itself was a positive predictor of the number of questing nymphs. This is a striking departure from the popular image of ticks as creatures that latch onto walkers in broad daylight, and it has immediate implications for how people, pets and wildlife encounter infected ticks in the field.

The second major moderator of activity was atmospheric moisture, captured by a single, elegant variable known as the saturation deficit. Saturation deficit combines air temperature and relative humidity into a measure of how strongly the air draws water from living tissue, and it is widely used by entomologists to describe desiccation stress in small terrestrial arthropods. Because ticks lack efficient water-conservation mechanisms and must periodically rehydrate within the humid microclimate of the soil and leaf litter, high saturation deficit effectively forces them off the vegetation and into protective refuges. In the new study, the density of questing nymphs was negatively associated with saturation deficit, meaning that hot, dry conditions suppressed host-seeking even when the season was otherwise favourable.

Crucially, the researchers showed that the strength of the nocturnal activity pattern itself varied with the seasonal moisture environment. Night-time questing was most evident in nymphs during months with high saturation deficit, when daytime conditions were too punishing for ticks to remain exposed. In cooler or wetter periods, when desiccation stress was lower, activity was distributed more evenly across the day. In other words, darkness does not simply switch ticks on; rather, harsh daytime climates push their activity into the night, and benign climates allow it to spread out. This interaction between the daily light cycle and seasonal moisture availability had not previously been demonstrated under natural field conditions for this species.

To untangle these effects, the team analysed their 24-hour, year-round dataset using Generalised Linear Mixed Modelling, a statistical framework well suited to count data with repeated measures. Mixed models allowed the investigators to account for the structure of the design, in which the same transects were sampled month after month at identical clock times, while testing the independent contributions of darkness, temperature, humidity and saturation deficit to tick density. The modelling confirmed that the negative effect of saturation deficit and the positive effect of darkness on questing nymph density were robust after controlling for the sampling structure, giving confidence that the observed rhythms reflect biology rather than artefacts of the schedule.

The seasonal dimension of the results was broadly reassuring for the field. The annual pattern of activity, with questing peaking in the warmer months and collapsing through winter, was largely consistent with previously published data on European tick phenology. Larvae, nymphs and adults each showed characteristic seasonal windows of host-seeking, reflecting the developmental timing that determines which life stages pose a threat at any given time of year. Nymphs, the stage most often implicated in transmitting Borrelia bacteria and tick-borne encephalitis virus to humans, dominated the datasets in the ways that surveillance specialists have come to expect.

What makes the study transformative is not the seasonal story but the daily one. Diel patterns in tick behaviour have been chronically understudied, largely because most tick surveillance is conducted during working hours, typically between mid-morning and late afternoon. If ticks quest mainly at night, or shift their activity into nocturnal windows during dry spells, then standard daytime dragging may systematically misestimate both true abundance and true biting risk. The authors point out that these commonly overlooked daily rhythms have important implications for estimating abundance in scientific research and surveillance programmes, and for interpreting how hazard varies across the day rather than across the year alone.

There are also ecological consequences for the transmission of pathogens among wildlife. Different host species are active at different times: birds, small mammals and deer partition the 24-hour cycle in ways that determine which hosts a nocturnal tick is most likely to encounter. If I. ricinus concentrates its host-seeking in the dark, the feeding opportunities available to it, and therefore the transmission circuits available to the pathogens it carries, may be structured by the clock as much as by the calendar. Reservoir hosts that forage at night could contribute disproportionately to infection cycles, while daytime-active animals, including humans, may benefit from the desiccation-driven suppression of tick activity during hot, dry daytime conditions. Understanding these synchronies could sharpen models of disease emergence and inform the timing of interventions, from acaricide application to public health messaging about when and where exposure risk peaks.

For the public, the practical message is nuanced rather than alarmist. Tick bites remain possible at any hour, and risk is shaped locally by habitat, vegetation and recent weather. But the study suggests that people walking in tick habitat during cool, humid evenings and overnight periods may face greater exposure than conventional advice implies, while hot, dry middays may offer comparatively lower risk, not because ticks are absent but because they are sheltering from the desiccating air. Dog walkers and other pet owners, whose animals often roam at dawn and dusk, should take particular note. As climate change alters temperature and humidity regimes across Europe, the seasonal windows and daily rhythms of tick activity are likely to shift in ways that current, daylight-biased surveillance is poorly equipped to detect. This year-round, round-the-clock field study offers a methodological template for closing that blind spot, and a timely reminder that the ecology of one of Europe’s most consequential disease vectors unfolds largely after dark.

Subject of Research: Seasonal and diel environmental drivers of host-seeking (questing) behaviour in the European tick vector Ixodes ricinus.

Article Title: Seasonal and diel environment effects on host-seeking behaviour in the European tick vector, Ixodes ricinus

Article References: Noll, M., Wall, R., Makepeace, B. L., & Rose Vineer, H. (2026). Seasonal and diel environment effects on host-seeking behaviour in the European tick vector, Ixodes ricinus. Parasites & Vectors. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13071-026-07679-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s13071-026-07679-5

Keywords: Ixodes ricinus, ticks, questing behaviour, host-seeking, saturation deficit, diel activity, seasonal activity, vector-borne disease, Lyme borreliosis, tick surveillance, Parasites & Vectors, field study

The research team, led by Dieter J. A. Heylen of the Evolutionary Ecology Group at the University of Antwerp, together with colleagues from the Luxembourg Institute of Health and certified bird ringers in Belgium, examined 284 redwings captured during late-autumn migration in 2022 and 2024. Both years were marked by unusually mild autumn conditions, a detail that proved central to interpreting the results. Of the birds sampled, 72.9 percent were infested with ticks, a rate the authors describe as the highest ever reported for this species anywhere in Europe. The overwhelming majority of the parasites collected were Ixodes ricinus, the castor bean tick whose blood-feeding stages are responsible for transmitting the majority of tick-borne infections to humans and domestic animals across the European continent.

The scale of pathogen carriage among those ticks was equally striking. The team screened 698 ticks removed from the migrating birds and found that 12.9 percent carried Borrelia bacteria. The infections were not confined to a single lineage. Genetic screening identified multiple genospecies of the Borrelia burgdorferi sensu lato complex, including strains associated with birds and others associated with mammals, alongside Borrelia miyamotoi, a relapsing-fever spirochete increasingly recognized as a human pathogen. Perhaps most telling, infected ticks were found on nearly one-third of the birds examined, meaning that a large proportion of the migrating population was effectively functioning as a long-distance courier service for viable, pathogen-laden parasites.

Extrapolating from their field measurements to the size of the European redwing population, the researchers estimate that tens of millions of Borrelia-infected ticks may be transported southward each autumn on the backs of these migrating thrushes. Ticks attached to birds can detach at stopover sites hundreds or thousands of kilometers from where they were acquired, seeding new locations with both the arthropods themselves and the pathogens they carry. Because migratory birds travel enormous distances in short periods, they represent one of the most efficient dispersal mechanisms available to ticks, whose own locomotion over a lifetime rarely exceeds a few meters. The study thus adds a seasonal dimension to what ecologists already understood about birds as tick vectors: the phenomenon does not stop when summer ends.

The timing of the infestations is what gives the work its conceptual force. Migratory birds calibrate the onset and pace of their journeys primarily by photoperiod, the changing length of daylight, which is an astronomical cue immune to year-to-year weather. Tick activity, by contrast, is governed largely by ambient temperature, since ticks are ectotherms whose questing behavior halts when conditions become cold. Historically, late-autumn temperatures across much of western and central Europe fell low enough to push ticks into dormancy well before the main passage of redwings, minimizing the overlap between the two biological calendars. The Belgium study, conducted during two exceptionally mild Novembers, documents what happens when that buffer disappears: host and parasite schedules collide, and the birds depart with an unintended cargo.

This divergence between climatically driven parasite activity and photoperiodically driven migration is a textbook example of a phenological mismatch, and the study’s authors argue that continued climate warming is likely to widen it in the parasites’ favor. Migration timing is comparatively stable, anchored to day length, while the tick activity season expands at both ends of the year as winters warm. Each increment of autumn warming therefore extends the period during which questing ticks can board migrating hosts. The consequence, according to the researchers, is a strengthening seasonal window for long-distance parasite dispersal, one that epidemiological models of Lyme disease risk have largely failed to incorporate because they treat late autumn as an epidemiological dead zone.

The age structure of the infestations added a further layer of biological insight. Birds in their first calendar year, that is, individuals hatched the same summer and undertaking their first migration, carried significantly higher tick loads than older birds. The authors suggest several non-exclusive explanations, including the inexperience of young birds in grooming and preening parasites effectively, behavioral differences in habitat use that bring first-year birds into closer contact with questing ticks, and possible physiological differences in skin characteristics that affect how readily ticks attach and feed. Whatever the mechanism, the pattern means that a disproportionate share of the dispersing parasite burden travels on the youngest cohort, the very individuals that make up the bulk of many migratory populations and that colonize wintering areas before returning north in spring.

The pathogens detected on these birds are of more than academic concern. Borrelia burgdorferi sensu lato encompasses the genospecies responsible for the great majority of Lyme borreliosis cases in Europe, an infection that can produce erythema migrans rashes, neurological complications, arthritis and cardiac involvement when untreated. Borrelia miyamotoi, though historically overshadowed by its Lyme-causing relatives, has been implicated in human cases of a relapsing-fever-like illness and, in immunocompromised patients, severe meningoencephalitis. The identification of both avian-associated and mammalian-associated genospecies on migrating redwings underscores the role of birds in maintaining and redistributing genetically diverse pathogen reservoirs, with consequences for the local disease ecology of every stopover and wintering ground along the flyway.

It is important to note that the study does not claim that migrating birds directly infect humans. Ticks feeding on birds do not transmit Borrelia to their hosts in ways that pose immediate public-health danger at the moment of capture. The risk pathway is indirect: infected ticks detach in new environments, and if those environments support the tick’s life cycle and suitable reservoir hosts, the parasites and their pathogens can establish locally. A southbound redwing that drops an infected larva or nymph in a French hedgerow, an Iberian woodland or a Mediterranean scrubland effectively introduces Borrelia genetic material into a new ecological arena, where subsequent feeding cycles on local wildlife can amplify and maintain the pathogen. The study’s contribution is to show that this introduction channel remains open deep into the season previously considered safe.

The work also carries a methodological message for disease surveillance. Monitoring programs for tick-borne pathogens in Europe typically concentrate their efforts on spring and early summer, when human exposure risk peaks and tick activity is maximal. The Belgian findings argue for extending surveillance into the late-autumn migration window, particularly during warm years, to capture a dispersal event of continental significance. With both sampling years of the study falling among the mildest autumns on record, and with climate projections pointing toward more frequent such conditions, the overlap between southbound migration and active, infected ticks may shift from an anomaly to a routine feature of the European disease landscape. What the redwings reveal, in effect, is that the geography and seasonality of Lyme disease risk are being quietly rewritten at altitude, one migrating thrush and one hitchhiking tick at a time.

Subject of Research: Late-autumn dispersal of Borrelia-infected ticks by southward-migrating redwings and its implications for Lyme disease epidemiology under climate warming

Article Title: Lyme beyond the season: late-autumn dissemination of infected ticks by southward migrating redwings (Turdus iliacus)

Article References: Heylen, D. J. A., Ledegen, I., Grimon, M., Reteng, P., Hübschen, J. M., & Krawczyk, A. I. (2026). Lyme beyond the season: late-autumn dissemination of infected ticks by southward migrating redwings (Turdus iliacus). Parasites & Vectors. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13071-026-07673-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s13071-026-07673-x

Keywords: Lyme disease, redwing, Turdus iliacus, Ixodes ricinus, Borrelia, bird migration, tick-borne pathogens, phenological mismatch, climate change, parasite dispersal, Borrelia miyamotoi, seasonal surveillance