Static electricity passively attracts ticks onto hosts.

ABSTRACT: Most terrestrial animals naturally accumulate electrostatic charges, meaning that they will generate electric forces that interact with other charges in their environment, including those on or within other organisms. However, how this naturally occurring static electricity influences the ecology and life history of organisms remains largely unknown.¹ Mammals, birds, and reptiles are known to carry appreciable net electrostatic charges, equivalent to surface potentials on the order of hundreds to tens of thousands of volts.^{1,2,3,4,5,6,7} Therefore, we hypothesize that their parasites, such as ticks, are passively attracted onto their surfa

SUBMITTER: England SJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7616434 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature