Congratulations, its a larva!

Well, our Ixodes scapularis eggs have finally begun to hatch!  On Tuesday, we had quite a few swarming around the container.  Not all the eggs have hatched and, as they were laid over the course of several days, I imagine we will have more larvae hatching over the week.

Oh, here's a little tick terminology/grammar lesson, larvae is the plural form of larva.  So, when you refer to just one, you should properly call it a larva, but if there are two or more you should refer to them as larvae.

Because they are stored in a brown bottle, the images are sometimes a little hazy, but here's some pix for the baby book!

I took a few out of the bottle to get a better close-up to see color and more detail, but they are less than 1mm in size and even with my digital microscope it was a challenge to get in close-up enough for super fine detail.  But, you can plainly see in most photos that these little buggers only have 6 legs.  Also, there are no festoons near their posterior (back) end.

So, with the hatching of these captive larvae, you should be on the watch for wild specimens.  Undoubtedly, they will be hard to spot, but it is grotesquely fascinating when you do!

A small swarm of larvae on a scrap of paper towel inside a brown specimen bottle.

On the left you can clearly see individual larva swarming around the bottle.  To the right the large, dark, oval-shaped blob is the body of the female tick.  All the way to the right are more unhatched eggs and larvae swarming over and around the eggs and the female tick.

To gain some perspective, this is the tip of a ball point pen and a ruler on the cm/mm scale side.  You can get a good idea of just how tiny these larvae are if you zoom out until the pen is "actual size."  Yikes!  That's small!

Here we have one larva on the left in the right side up position.  On the right you are viewing the underside of the larva.  This is zoomed in as far as my digital camera will go.

-C. Fisher, photos by C. Fisher