
You get conditions like Lyme disease from ticks in areas such as woods where deer live. Right? Yes, but now you can catch the disease right outside your front door – if you are growing the wrong sort of shrub in your garden.
American tick expert Brian Allan says that deer are coming into the gardens of homes to eat plants and shrubs such as bush honeysuckle, also known as Amur honeysuckle (Lonicera maackii), a native plant of Manchuria.
The shrub is attracting white-tailed deer, which are leaving behind large populations of tick. Allan reckons that areas where the honeysuckle is popular have 10 times the concentrations of bacteria-infested tick compared to honeysuckle-free neighbourhoods.
(Source: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2010; doi: 10.1073/pnas.1008362107).
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