Stacy Mowry

• MS, BA
• PhD Student at University of Notre Dame

Medically important ixodid ticks often carry multiple pathogens, with individual ticks frequently coinfected and capable of transmitting multiple infections to hosts, including humans. Acquisition of multiple zoonotic pathogens by immature blacklegged ticks (Ixodes scapularis) is facilitated when they feed on small mammals, which are the most compe...

Although human exposure to the ticks that transmit Lyme-disease bacteria is widely considered to occur around people’s homes, most studies of variation in tick abundance and infection are undertaken outside residential areas. Consequently, the patterns of variation in risk of human exposure to tick-borne infections in these human-dominated landscap...

Background Controlling populations of ticks with biological or chemical acaricides is often advocated as a means of reducing human exposure to tick-borne diseases. Reducing tick abundance is expected to decrease immediate risk of tick encounters and disrupt pathogen transmission cycles, potentially reducing future exposure risk. Materials and Meth...

Acaricides are hypothesized to reduce human risk of exposure to tick-borne pathogens by decreasing the abundance and/or infection prevalence of the ticks that serve as vectors for the pathogens. Acaricides targeted at reservoir hosts such as small mammals are expected to reduce infection prevalence in ticks by preventing their acquisition of zoonot...

Despite the widespread adoption of motion-triggered camera traps, studies using camera traps to characterize wildlife communities in residential areas in North America are limited. To fill this data gap, we placed camera traps over three seasons in 22 residential neighborhoods within Dutchess County, NY. To account for imperfect detection, we appli...

Tickborne diseases (TBDs) such as Lyme disease result in ≈500,000 diagnoses annually in the United States. Various methods can reduce the abundance of ticks at small spatial scales, but whether these methods lower incidence of TBDs is poorly understood. We conducted a randomized, replicated, fully crossed, placebo-controlled, masked experiment to t...

Despite the widespread adoption of motion-triggered cameras, studies using camera-traps to characterize wildlife communities in human-impacted, residential areas in North America are limited. To fill this data gap, we placed camera traps over three seasons in 22 residential neighborhoods within Dutchess County, NY. To account for imperfect detectio...

Public health authorities recommend a range of nonchemical measures to control blacklegged ticks Ixodes scapularis Say, 1821 (Ixodida: Ixodidae) in residential yards. Here we enumerate these recommendations and assess their relationship to larval tick abundance in 143 yards in Dutchess County, New York, an area with high Lyme disease incidence. We...

Reproductive skew is the unequal partitioning of breeding within social groups. Mating hierarchies emerge wherein one dominant mating pair holds an unproportional majority of the group’s reproductive benefit, while other members mate infrequently, yet allocate energy and resources toward the offspring of the dominant group members. In this paper, w...