[jjeaff]

So how do your friends suggest that they store the hundreds or thousands of ticks per season that your average farmer or outdoorsman might pull off themselves?

I guess we'll need some sort of rolling catalog system, labels for the dates etc. Perhaps a dedicated lab freezer with specimen vials would do the trick. Of course, if there are ever any symptoms, we'll have to have hundreds of ticks checked. I wonder what that costs? Would your insurance cover the testing of 275 tiny ticks? Or maybe we need a database system to take photos of the bite area, then we can bar code the offending tick and upload the photo to the system.

https://www.terrauniversal.com/gallery/lab_equipment/images/...

[Fomite]

Given the testing involves mashing them up, I don't expect the volume of ticks to be a particular problem. Given the average incubation period for most diseases of concern is less than two weeks, we're talking about at worst a dozen or so ziploc bags, and that's if you're taking ticks off yourself every day.

Two other notes: I'm highly skeptical that "thousands" of ticks is your average outdoorsman, especially given the seasonality of ticks, and the reported volume of tick bites in forestry workers, which wasn't that high and my colleagues did consider appalling.

Second: "The South" which you keep mentioning is not made up of just farmers and outdoorsmen. It's also made up of major urban areas with large forest fragmentation issues.