Do you often find ticks on yourself or on your pets? We need your help! Project
Acari is tracking tick disease. Join us today!
Project Acari wants to understand how dangerous tick diseases are affecting our communities.
Send us the ticks you find in your neighborhood using our free easy to use Kit.
By working together with thousands of citizen scientists, Project Acari wants to understand how dangerous tick diseases are affecting our communities.
Hundreds of thousands of people, dogs and cats are affected by tick diseases, like Lyme disease, every year. Ticks carry over 20 different known diseases, and there may be more we haven’t discovered yet. As global temperatures rise, these diseases are spreading.
Project Acari is going right to the heart of this epidemic. We are studying the ticks themselves to find out where the risk of contracting disease is highest, and how diseases spread from year to year. We are also studying how other factors, like climate change and the tick’s microbiome, may affect the risk of tick diseases.
We need you to send us the ticks you find in your neighborhood, whether you’re worried about tick diseases or not. By testing the DNA of ticks from across the United States, we can build the most complete map yet of how these diseases are affecting ourselves and our pets.
Carefully place the tick on the center of the sticky side of sticker provided and then attach the sticker to the Tick Card, such that the tick is placed in the center of one of the circles on the Tick Card.
You can store the Tick Card at room temperature for 2 weeks from the day you stick the first tick on to it.
The CDC website provides detailed descriptions of how to remove ticks.
Yes, once you send us the first Tick Card, we can send you another one upon request.
We will use new DNA sequencing technology to test for Lyme disease, Anaplasmosis, Babesiosis, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, Rickettsia parkeri rickettsiosis (spotted fever), Ehrlichiosis, Tularemia. We will also test the species and sex of each tick, and sequence the tick’s microbiome, which may influence which diseases it carries.
The data will be publically available through our website once we have received and process enough ticks.