CO2 attractant allows collection of hundreds of ticks from 60 locations within 2 hours

Traditional tick surveys using a drag take about an hour to collect a single sample. As a result, time constraints limit the number of samples that one person can collect. A CO₂ bait attracted ticks to pitfall made a one quart plastic deli container. Traps were set in late evening and Ticks were observed moving towards the trap within 5 minutes. About 8 am the following morning the traps were collected yielding from zero to over one hundred ticks at each trap. Ticks  were rapidly placed in the quart container, along with a pre-printed label and stored on ice until they were processed in the lab. Within a two hour period large numbers of ticks were easily collected from sixty locations. This sampling technique generates sample sizes that are large enough to enable statistical comparisons of habitat preferences, windows of activity and other ecological and behavioral characteristics of ticks.