Ticks are Indestructible: Survive Electron Microscope and Vacuum
Ever tried to kill a tick? And I don't mean a puffed up one, I mean one you just found walking up your leg?
They are freaking hard to kill, and I should know. For some reason ticks love me: when I was a kid I would go camping, no one else would have any ticks and I would wake up with 5. I also have always loved dogs.. and the outdoors... and all in all, have had a lot of ticks. Thousands really (and Lyme disease three times).
But how do you kill them? You can stamp on them, try and drown them, crush them, etc etc - and they don't die. Turns out that one scientist found they were living in a vacuum - and so went one step further.
They are freaking hard to kill, and I should know. For some reason ticks love me: when I was a kid I would go camping, no one else would have any ticks and I would wake up with 5. I also have always loved dogs.. and the outdoors... and all in all, have had a lot of ticks. Thousands really (and Lyme disease three times).
But how do you kill them? You can stamp on them, try and drown them, crush them, etc etc - and they don't die. Turns out that one scientist found they were living in a vacuum - and so went one step further.
Up Close With the First Living Animal Captured via Scanning Electron Microscopy via Not Exactly Rocket Science
You didn’t wake up this morning thinking that a tick under a scanning electron microscope was going to be the coolest thing you saw all day, and yet here you are. After discovering some ticks alive inside a vacuum drying chamber, Yasuhito Ishigaki of Kanazawa Medical University decided to see if the hardy little bloodsuckers could stand up to the electron bombardment and vacuum conditions inside a scanning electron microscope (SEM). They could, and he’s got the video to prove it.
SEM rigs are great for capturing very fine detail of very small things, but they aren’t easy on their subjects. They work by bombarding a sample with electrons and recording how they scatter to create an image. Air interferes with this electron beam, so all this takes place inside a vacuum. And samples are often stained or even coated with metal beforehand to enhance the resolution of the microscopy.
All said, life is not good for a SEM sample. In fact, putting anything living into an SEM sample chamber pretty much ensures that it won’t be living when you take it out. But this clearly isn’t true for ticks. In the video below, you can clearly see the tick moving its legs. Ishigaki did this with 20 different ticks, and all of them survived, making them the first animals to ever be scanned with SEM.
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