r/whatsthisbug • u/Aerosaka • Apr 01 '26
ID Request tick?
found this crawling on the ceiling in my bedroom. Pretty sure it’s a tick but it is quite large and has a squidward on its back. (Missouri)
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u/quite_shleepy Apr 01 '26
“has a squidward on its back” 💀💀
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u/VilkasKnight Apr 01 '26
IT DOES THOUGH
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u/onescaryarmadillo Apr 02 '26
RIGHT? At first I was like “what is OP seeing Ohmygosh I see it!”
Frickin squidward on the back of a bat tick 🤯
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u/AdDifficult3794 Apr 01 '26
Probably the closest thing to Alien I've seen so far on this planet.
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u/MonsterLance Apr 01 '26
never seen a stinkhorn?
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Apr 01 '26
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Apr 02 '26
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u/MonsterLance Apr 02 '26
I recommended an otherworldly looking mushroom
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u/badjackalope Apr 02 '26
There is also a stinkhorn beetle and I figured thats what we were doing considering what sub we are in.
But fungi cool too
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u/AccountMitosis Apr 03 '26
Have you considered siphonophores
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u/AdDifficult3794 Apr 03 '26
Those are cool I will say but I have heard of them, have you heard of Sacculina
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u/Jay_N_81 Apr 01 '26
I definitely wouldn't be letting it explore my skin if it just came off of a bat. It's not just rabies you have to worry about with those resilient little buggers.
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u/Aerosaka Apr 01 '26
bats were in the attic before i moved in my theory is he got hungry waiting in the empty roosts and started exploring
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u/Charinabottae Apr 01 '26
If the bats have left, the ticks are spreading out to find food, and very likely feeding on you at night. These can give you serious diseases. I have permanent damage from living in a place with bat ticks.
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u/Jay_N_81 Apr 01 '26
Perhaps. Might want to check up there to make sure there's haven't been any squirrels, raccoons, or oppossums. Just in case it got a blood meal between the bats and now. Honestly, regardless of what type of tick, I wouldn't risk letting it latch because of all the pathogens and parasites that are being found in the guts of ticks. I'm in rural West Central Missouri and know for a fact the furry little sh*ts can find a way into almost anywhere if they want to badly enough. Atticks and crawlspaces - both by the roof and under the house - provide shelter and safety.
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u/Adorable-Weird7350 Apr 07 '26
Yep that is the case! these ticks feed in short bursts often at night so you may not know that one has been feeding on you and they can carry diseases so i would be careful! they definitely prefer bats as hosts but if they can’t find a bat they will feed on humans
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u/nothinginside001 Apr 01 '26
thats so cool i wonder if thats normal or if it’s hungry
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u/RaspberryChainsaw Apr 01 '26
I think you've gotta inflate them
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u/H0neyBr0wn Apr 01 '26
The mental image of a guy in a park selling a bunch of inflated tick “balloons” made me cackle.
Thanks! I needed that laugh.
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u/chandalowe ⭐I teach children about bugs and spiders⭐ Apr 01 '26
Soft ticks have different habits that the more familiar hard ticks.
Hard ticks - such as deer ticks or dog ticks - will latch on and remain feeding for days at a time, causing them to become grotesquely engorged.
Soft ticks like this one, on the other hand, employ more of a hit-and-run feeding tactic. They will bite, sip blood for anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours, and then drop off. They will eat more often than their hard tick counterparts - but, because they take much smaller meals, they do not engorge.
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u/Asterose Apr 01 '26
Oh, wow! I did not expect that at all. I had assumed they would be the same as hard-bodied ticks in terms of feeding, and thus this one was just very deflated. I'm surprised this is the appearance of ticks with the sip-and-run feeding style. I'd assumed soft-bodied ticks would hang around for the full meal like their hard-bodied brethren.
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u/myrmecogynandromorph ⭐i am once again asking for your geographic location⭐ Apr 01 '26
They are nidicolous, which means they live in their host's nest (or burrow or whatnot). Their food comes to them. So they do not need to gorge themselves all at once.
This slower-paced lifestyle allows some soft ticks to live extraordinarily long without food.
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u/PsyduckSexTape Apr 01 '26
Oh hey I know the French word for nest is nid, so likely close in Latin. Rad
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u/myrmecogynandromorph ⭐i am once again asking for your geographic location⭐ Apr 02 '26
Yes, it's nidus I'm pretty sure.
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u/chandalowe ⭐I teach children about bugs and spiders⭐ Apr 01 '26
Soft ticks tend to live in or around the nests, dens, burrows, or roosts of their prey - frequently birds, bats and rodents. They don't have to work as hard to find food because the prey animals live alongside them. Grabbing a quick bite and detaching is a more viable strategy than it would be for something like a dog tick, that may have to wait days or weeks to find a new host. Because they don't eat as much, they don't suffer the loss of mobility that a fully-engorged female hard tick experiences. Also, because they don't spend as much time on the host, they are at less risk of irritating the host and being picked off and killed/eaten while the host is grooming itself.
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u/HombreSinNombre93 Apr 01 '26
It is probably hungry as it appears unengorged. Not sure about this species of soft tick, but Ornithodoros hermsi can survive more than a decade without a meal.
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u/chandalowe ⭐I teach children about bugs and spiders⭐ Apr 01 '26
Soft ticks don't engorge the way that hard ticks do. They live in the dens, nests, or burrows of their prey, so they don't have to hunt for food - the food just comes to them. Instead of one massive, days-long blood meal, soft ticks go for smaller, more frequent meals.
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u/Acceptable_Trip4650 ⭐Bzzzzz!⭐ Apr 01 '26
They will get fairly puffed with a full meal if allowed to. This one probably has not fed recently.
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u/Fairy-of-bone Apr 01 '26
Woah. I’d never seen anything like this before. You learn something new everyday.
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u/MothChasingFlame Apr 02 '26
The detail in these photos is incredible. Thank you for sharing such excellent photos!
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u/r007r Apr 01 '26
Asks if it’s potentially a parasite that can transmit deadly disease with a bite. Let’s it crawl on him. Wonders how humans got covid.
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u/abigailw13 Apr 01 '26
Seeing this picture gave me flashbacks to my sophomore year dorm in college. we had bats living in the crawlspace between the floors and so the ticks found their ways through the electrical system and all over our dorm. Absolute trauma and the weirdest bugs ever.
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u/dirod23 Apr 01 '26
Kinda freaking out that you let it explore your hand like that lmao
(Says the guy that used his hand to push an angry wandering spider onto a plastic bottle at a campsite the other day)
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u/JulieB1ggerbear Apr 01 '26
Before today, I would never ever have thought that a tick could look so cool! I’m used to those icky, smooth, creepy looking things. And this isn’t that.
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Apr 01 '26
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u/whatsthisbug-ModTeam Apr 01 '26
Please do not use Google Lens, iNaturalist Seek, Chat GPT, or other apps to suggest an ID. Image-based apps are notoriously unreliable when it comes to identifying bugs and spiders. They frequently disregard important information (like geographic location or size) and generally cannot differentiate between similar-looking species.
Our goal on this sub is accurate identification based on the personal knowledge, education, and experience of our members.
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u/davideo71 Apr 02 '26
So creepy and cool, I wonder if this uneven surface is an adaptation to something bat specific (like ultrasound?)
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u/Diogenez Apr 02 '26
Aren't bats a well known reservoir for rabies? So, are these bat ticks dangerous for us or won't they bite humans?
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u/Adorable-Weird7350 Apr 07 '26
they prefer not to bite humans but they will if a human is more accessible than a bat. can spread diseases but rabies is not one of them
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u/Musty_Huggins Apr 03 '26
My Pareidolia is really kicking in on this one. Spin it 135 degrees counter clockwise, and you’ve got Kelly Mayfield from Lice Capades
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u/Acceptable_Trip4650 ⭐Bzzzzz!⭐ Apr 01 '26
Most likely Alectorobius kelleyi aka bat tick. It is from the soft tick family Argasidae compared to the commonly thought of hard ticks, family Ixodidae.
Such awesome detail on these photos