Item — HN Reader

> something's not adding up here

One factor might be that reproduction rate ≠ survival rate, i.e., not all of the ticks born will reproduce. For example, it usually takes several growth stages for ticks to reach fertility, where each of these phases require a blood meal. So if they don’t find a suitable host in time, they starve to death. Or they are eaten themselves by another predator, etc.

1 comments

So there are limitations which are left out of this article which seems to promote fear based journalism.

Because they leave out important info it makes it hard to judge appropriate alarm level which makes it clickbait and I will ignore it.

The article says that one Asian longhorned tick “can lay up to 2,000 eggs without needing to mate” (emphasis mine). This doesn’t imply that this tick breed generally has an effective reproduction rate of 2000, let alone that this rate was annual.