Western Fence Lizards, Ticks, and Lyme
This is an interesting article. Previously known was that Western fence lizards carry a protein that kills B. burgdorferi bacteria (including from ticks that feed on them). In this study, the researchers removed the lizards from a test plot of land and found the tick population dropped 95% compared to a control group.
“When you have an animal like Western fence lizards that ‘support’ such a huge population of ticks, you can’t assume that those juvenile ticks will go to another host if the lizard population drops,” said Robert Lane, a UC Berkeley entomologist who discovered the microbe-killing protein in lizard blood
