Mm.

Um, folks don't necessarily think about, and it's very different than something like, say, a mosquito.

When we are bitten by a mosquito, we know mosquitoes can carry certain diseases, but a mosquito lands, they bite ya, and it's a, a fast process.

You know, they're not sitting on you for minutes and minutes and minutes or hours or anything like that 'cause you're gonna notice them and, and squash 'em.

You know, it's a matter of, of seconds or, or less than a minute for the most part.

With ticks, though, it's a very long feeding process, and when a tick bites you, they may be attached for upwards of a week, and the longer the attachment time, the greater the risk for disease transmission.

It turns out each disease carried by ticks can have a slightly different length of time that they require for effective transmission of the pathogen.

Right.

Why might that be?

yeah so i think this is a great question and before i even get to the answer i would say this is a really cool example of how if you take the time and make observations you can learn things and see things in the world around you could be at school could be in your own yard but If you do that enough and you make these observations, you can make little scientific discoveries all over the place.

So I think that's really cool, kind of the background for this question.

So a couple of things come to mind.

And I think a key thing that stands out to me is a term that we would refer to as microclimate.

So we think of climate as a whole affecting larger areas and global processes.

But on a very small scale, you can talk about microclimate.

But I guess I don't really know any other examples beyond that.

But my question here is, do I need to be worried at all? Will these things, do they bite me? Will they bite my cats if they're out there? What's up with midges? What do people need to know? Yeah.

So the main thing to know about midges is they are completely harmless.

I mean, well, I suppose if you're riding down the bike path near Monona Terrace and you inhale a big lungful of them and you keel over and scrape your knee, I can't take responsibility for that.

But for the most part, they don't bite.

They're a nuisance.

They will come out of the water.

They develop as juveniles, larvae and pupae in the water.

What can you tell us about that?