Working together to make Martha's Vineyard safer from tick-borne disease and allergies.
A science-based, Island-wide effort that includes bringing the deer herd into ecological balance, alongside other proven interventions, to significantly reduce the Island’s tick population and address a growing public health crisis.
Why Deer?
Most of a tick's life is spent off a host, scattered throughout the environment where they're difficult to target. This makes the moment a tick finds and feeds on a host the most vulnerable — and actionable — point in its life cycle. That's why our efforts at Tick Free MV focus on tick-host interactions: the key bottleneck where we can make the most impact.Of all the animals on Martha's Vineyard, deer stand out as the most significant — serving as reproductive, dispersal, and reservoir hosts, meaning they support ticks at every key stage of their life cycle.
Nationwide research consistently identifies deer as key reproductive and dispersal hosts for several tick species — including the deer tick and lone star tick, both central to the tick problem on Martha's Vineyard.
An estimated 90% of adult deer ticks feed on deer at critical stages in their life cycle.As the largest warm-blooded animals on Martha's Vineyard, deer are the preferred host for most ticks — and lone star ticks in particular, which have a strong preference for large-bodied mammals.
Nationwide research consistently identifies deer as key dispersal hosts for several tick species — including the deer tick and lone star tick, both central to the tick problem on Martha's Vineyard.
No other host species covers as great a range of territory on the Island. Female deer (does) range 100 to 800 acres, while males can cover 400 to 2,000 acres.Deer do not protect themselves from tick bites (unlike humans, pets, and livestock), and are constantly navigating through tick habitat.
Deer are reservoir hosts for ehrlichia chaffeensis (which causes ehrlichiosis), but do not serve as reservoir hosts for Lyme disease, babesiosis, anaplasmosis, or other tick-borne infections.
Tickborne disease experts agree that addressing the problem fully requires an "Integrated Tick Management" approach, combining multiple strategies that target ticks, hosts, diseases, and the environment. But on Martha's Vineyard, any of these interventions will have limited impact without first addressing deer density. Reducing deer populations is the necessary first step.
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This letter is written by three scientists, Dr. Sam Telford a Professor of Infectious Disease and Global Health at Tufts University, Patrick Roden-Reynolds is the Public Health Biologist for the Inter-Island Public Health Excellence Collaborative, and Richard Johnson is the former director of the MV Tick-Borne Illness Reduction Program and a board member of TickFreeMV.org. Who have taken the time to write this letter to the island’s community to help answer the question, Why Deer?
