Abstract：
Diseases caused by ticks are often addressed as a traditional epidemiological mathematical puzzle, i.e., how many identical infected vectors, how many uniform potential hosts, and a dependable rate of transmission, etc. Although often useful at the population level, at the individual level disease transmission occurs when one tick bites one person. Just as we assign agency to people in their outdoor behavior and use of prophylactics against arthropods, perhaps we should also see ticks as individual actors? Are all ticks automatons that just quest and attach, or do they exhibit repeatable individual behaviors that affect transmission? We wanted to determine whether Dermacentor andersoni and D. variabilis adult ticks exhibited repeatable behaviors in four experiments. The experiments focused on left/right movement, attraction to CO2, photophilic tendencies, and avoidance of a repellant. We hypothesized that over two seasons we would find repeatable behavior patterns. In 2021, but not 2022, we found that within an experiment, individuals exhibited repeatable behaviors between trials and between experiments, i.e., if an animal showed repeatable \'adventurous\' behavior in one experiment, this predicted adventurous behavior in a separate experiment. This strong evidence of predictable trait-like behavior was present in 2021 but was absent when we repeated the same experiments, with the same collection site, in 2022. This illustrates the importance of multiyear experimentation when testing for repeatable individual behaviors. Incidental to the study, we also observed that a major heat wave in 2021 altered the tick species composition (toward a more dry-adapted population) at our study site.
摘要：
由蜱引起的疾病通常作为传统的流行病学数学难题来解决，即，有多少相同的感染媒介，有多少均匀的潜在宿主，和可靠的传输速率，等。虽然通常在人口层面有用，在个体水平上，当一个蜱叮咬一个人时，疾病就会传播。就像我们为人们的户外行为和对节肢动物的预防措施的使用分配代理一样，也许我们也应该把蜱视为个体演员？所有蜱都是追求和依附的自动机，还是它们表现出影响传播的可重复的个体行为？我们想在四个实验中确定Dermacentorandersoni和D.variabilis成年蜱是否表现出可重复的行为。实验集中在左/右运动上，对二氧化碳的吸引力，嗜光趋势，以及回避驱逐者。我们假设在两个季节中，我们会发现可重复的行为模式。在2021年，但不是2022年，我们发现在一个实验中，个体在试验之间和实验之间表现出可重复的行为，即，如果一个动物在一个实验中表现出可重复的冒险行为，这在一个单独的实验中预测了冒险行为。这种可预测的特质样行为的有力证据出现在2021年，但当我们重复同样的实验时，这种证据并不存在。使用相同的收集网站，2022年。这说明了在测试可重复的个人行为时，多年实验的重要性。与研究无关，我们还观察到，在我们的研究地点，2021年的主要热浪改变了蜱物种的组成（朝向更干燥的适应种群）。
