"There was proof of mice all over. they'd utterly taken," says Keesing, associate biologist at Bard faculty.
It was an endemic of mice. And it had landed right in Keesing's room.
"Not solely were there mouse dejection on our countertops, however we tend to conjointly found dead mice on the room floor," says Keesing's husband, Rick Ostfeld, associate biologist at the Cary Institute of system Studies in Millbrook, N.Y.
The river depression old a mouse plague throughout the summer of 2016. The critters were all over. for many individuals, it absolutely was simply a nuisance. except for Keesing and Ostfeld, the mouse plague signaled one thing foreboding.
"We're anticipating 2017 to be a very risky year for Lyme," Ostfeld says.
Keesing and Ostfeld, WHO have studied Lyme for quite twenty years, have return up with associate early warning system for the illness. they will predict what number cases there'll be a year prior to by staring at one key measurement: Count the mice the year before.
The number of critters scampering round the forest within the summer correlates to the Lyme cases the subsequent summer, they've reportable.
The explanation is simple: Mice ar extremely economical transmitters of Lyme. They infect up to ninety five p.c of ticks that kill them. Mice ar answerable for infecting the bulk of ticks carrying Lyme within the Northeast. And ticks love mice. "An individual mouse might need fifty, 60, even a hundred ticks covering its ears and face," Ostfeld says.
