Moose in the Wasatch Mountains are being “sucked to death” by ticks, Utah Division of Wildlife Resources researcher Kent Hersey said, explaining a decades-long decline in their population. Warmer winters, meanwhile, mean a boom for the parasite’s population, so biologists are working on a solution to stave off the pests.
“We haven’t seen tremendous declines,” Hersey said. “We had concerns in those drought years of 2018, 2020, and that’s when we started formulating the idea that, ‘Well, we need to continue some of the work we’ve been doing to really get a grasp of what’s going on with the moose here in Utah — and specifically on the Wasatch.’”
Hersey said Utah’s moose population is currently a little under 3,000, a few hundred beyond the population low of about 2,600 in 2013, according to the state’s 2017 moose management plan. The plan, which is updated every 10 years, said moose populations did not rebound as quickly as they should have, while more recent studies pointed to ticks as the culprit.
While moose are susceptible to the minuscule blood-suckers, elk and deer fare far better. That fact may have wildlife managers puzzled, but it’s not the main question they are setting out to answer in a new study this year.
Instead, Hersey is leading a research effort to figure out where and when moose are getting infested. Answering those questions, he said, could help preserve moose in the mountains.
Ticks attach to animals in the fall as larvae, living on them for months before feeding off the animal’s blood in early spring, just before calving season begins in May. A few ticks aren’t a huge problem, but some moose are home to over 10,000 of the pests, Hersey said.
“When you have that amount of blood being taken from you, obviously, it’s a lot of energy to replenish that blood, and then it’s very irritating as well,” he said. “So the moose are rubbing their coats, and they break their hair off… they look horrible, and all their hair is missing, and it’s because of these ticks, where they’re rubbing to try and get them off.”
A half-bald moose can’t handle the cold weather in which it usually thrives, so the animal has to use more of its energy and fat stores to warm up, which causes many to die of malnutrition as a result, Hersey said. The ticks, he added, are particularly devastating to calves.
Read Jordan Miller's full story at sltrib.com.
This article is published through the Utah News Collaborative, a partnership of news organizations in Utah that aims to inform readers across the state.