My Strange Kinship with a Tick

This essay on tick kinship, Lyme disease, and ecological degradation is part of the Companion Species series, which investigates a complex, interconnected, and co-constituted web of beyond-human relating. Series editors: Tessa Archambault, Dylan Couch, Kuhelika Ghosh, Ellie Kincaid, and Bri Meyer.

---

The tick found me on the Camino de Santiago. Like millions of pilgrims before me, I was walking an ancient path seeking transformation, while the tick—perhaps no larger than a comma—sought something simpler: a blood meal that would allow it to reproduce, to persist.

Our paths crossed somewhere in the Pyrenees, though I couldn’t say exactly where. In that moment of contact—while sweat dampened my skin from the day’s climb and the forest’s shadows played across my bare legs—the tick deployed its specialized mouthparts. With microscopic precision, it sliced through my epidermis, painlessly inserting its barbed hypostome while secreting a cocktail of anticoagulants and anesthetics. The creature settled in the warm microclimate of my skin beneath my hiking shorts where it would feed undisturbed, its body gradually swelling with my blood while I continued walking, oblivious to our intimacy. The tick’s bite was imperceptible, its presence unknown until weeks later, when my vision began to splinter into a digital mosaic of tiny squares, as if reality itself had become pixelated.

This is how it begins—not with the dramatic bull’s-eye rash that medical textbooks warn about, but with subtle shifts in perception. The world becomes grainy, staticky, like an old television struggling to hold its picture. Modern medicine calls this “visual snow syndrome,” but that clinical term fails to capture the existential vertigo of watching your consciousness fragment in real time. The tick had not just changed my body; it had altered my way of seeing, rewriting the course of my life.

What Does a Tick See?

Donna Haraway grapples with the moral complexities of blood-sucking insects through the lens of Hélène Cixous’s haunting story about her childhood dog, Fips, who was slowly consumed by ticks “big as chickpeas.” Cixous’s failure to care for her tick-ridden dog becomes, in Haraway’s hands, a meditation on the impossibility of ideal love and the challenge of entering into ethical relations with creatures whose existence seems predicated on suffering.

The tick presents this dilemma in its most concentrated form: how can we enter into meaningful relation with a creature whose existence depends on our suffering? They don’t just bite—they burrows into our flesh, drink our blood, and potentially reorganize our neural pathways with bacterial payload. Yet I’ve come to see the tick as more than just a parasite. It is, paradoxically, one of my most profound teachers—showing me how ecological transformation, even when unwelcome, can awaken us to the intricate connections between all living beings and the environment we collectively shape.

Jakob von Uexküll’s work especially resonated with my experience. He famously made the tick the central protagonist in his exploration of what he called “umwelt,” or the specific ways organisms of species perceive the world. A tick’s umwelt revolves around three sensations: the smell of butyric acid (present in mammalian sweat), the temperature of 37 degrees Celsius (the warmth of blood), and the tactile sense that guides this “blind and deaf highway bandit” to its feeding spot.

As I grappled with my newly pixelated vision—my own umwelt forever altered—I found dissonant comfort in this radical reduction of reality to essential elements. My own crisis of perception had led me to envy this simplicity even as I struggled to integrate my new way of seeing. The visual snow was just the beginning. Next came the crushing fatigue, the joint pain that migrated unpredictably through my body, and the cognitive fog that descended like a heavy blanket, making simple tasks feel insurmountable.

There were days I couldn’t retrieve basic words mid-conversation, nights spent in feverish confusion, and mornings when I’d wake to find my body seemingly belonged to someone else. Medical appointments became a part-time job as I shuttled between specialists who often seemed more skeptical than helpful, most suggesting the symptoms were psychosomatic.

“Is the tick a machine or a machinist, a mere object or a subject?” Uexküll’s fundamental question took on new meaning for me as I grappled with its disruption of my life. This microscopic being had not merely infected me; it had colonized my existence, reshaping my relationship with my body, my work, and the living world I once moved through with unthinking confidence. At first, I hated it with the kind of visceral loathing reserved for things that destroy us from within. I wished for its eradication from the fields and forests of my home in Quebec, where its expanding presence felt like an invasion.

An Ecological Messenger

But as the years passed and I watched ticks claim more and more of our northern landscape, a different understanding began to emerge. Their increasing abundance wasn’t just a random occurrence, but a response to warming temperatures—a signal of deeper environmental changes. Wangari Maathai’s research on East Coast Fever, a tick-borne disease that proved fatal to colonial cattle but not to indigenous species, observed ticks as indicators of environmental degradation in Kenya. Their presence coincided with muddy, eroded rivers, and malnourished cattle struggling to survive on depleted soils, which were made that way by modern farming and ranching practices.

Maathai founded the Green Belt Movement, an environmental organization that demonstrated how local environmental actions—like planting trees—could address global climate challenges. More importantly, she revealed how even stigmatized creatures like ticks can illuminate crucial truths about ecological relationships and environmental health, while also highlighting the wisdom of Indigenous knowledge systems in understanding these complex interactions.

Over the past decades, Quebec’s own forests have experienced subtle but profound shifts. Warming winters no longer reliably kill ticks, extended fall seasons prolong tick activity, and host animals like white-tailed deer and small rodents migrate farther north. The tick’s expanding presence here isn’t an invasion, but a response to conditions we humans have created—a message about climate change and ecosystem transformation we might prefer not to hear.

Strange Kinship

Yet the tick’s role extends beyond that of ecological messenger. The bacteria it carries, Borrelia burgdorferi, is an ancient organism that has evolved over sixty millennia to survive in both arthropod and mammalian hosts. When it enters human blood, it doesn’t simply attack—it adapts, changes shape, hides in tissues, and creates protective biofilms. In this way, the tick and its bacterial passengers become teachers of metamorphosis, demonstrating through their very existence that survival often means becoming with others.

My own transformation began with that imperceptible bite, as the clear divisions between self and world, between health and illness, between human and non-human, began to blur. My vision became permanently altered—not damaged exactly, but shifted into a different register. Everything I see now comes with a subtle overlay of static, a constant reminder that reality is more complex, more grainy and indeterminate, than we usually acknowledge.

This altered perception has fundamentally changed how I understand both illness and ecology. The tick and its bacterial passengers have revealed how deeply interconnected all living systems truly are. My blood is no longer just my own—it has become a medium of exchange, a shared resource, a meeting place between species. The boundaries we draw between organisms begin to seem arbitrary when we recognize how much of our DNA comes from viral insertions, how many bacteria we depend on for survival, how thoroughly we are all entangled in webs of mutual influence and transformation.

Perhaps the costs of the tick’s lesson is exactly the kind of shock we need to shake us out of our anthropocentric complacency. Through its disruption of our bodies and our assumptions, the tick reminds us that we are not separate from nature but thoroughly embedded within it. Our bodies are not fortresses but permeable membranes, constantly engaging in exchanges with other organisms.

This is not to romanticize illness or to suggest we shouldn’t treat Lyme disease. Rather, it’s to recognize that even in its parasitism, the tick offers profound insights about the necessity of transformation in a changing world. These tiny arachnids have become unlikely teachers, showing us how to adapt and persist in a world of constant change.

When I walk in the woods now, I take precautions—long sleeves, tick checks, careful attention to where I step. But I also feel a strange kinship with these creatures that have so thoroughly transformed my way of being in the world.

“Invasive” Journeys

This felt kinship extends beyond the tick to the plant allies that became my medicine. Following Stephen Harrod Buhner’s herbal protocol, I found healing—notably, through Japanese knotweed, a plant often maligned as invasive yet possessing antimicrobial and neuroprotective compounds that helped me find a new balance. The knotweed, which evolved alongside Borrelia for millennia, seemed to understand the bacteria’s adaptive strategies in ways modern medicine is only beginning to grasp.

This plant-based healing journey allowed me to experience my body as an ecosystem more attuned to the countless invisible exchanges that make life possible—not just of risk and harm, but of resilience and unexpected healing. The visual static that now overlays my perception serves as a constant reminder of this lesson. It’s as if through the tick gave me new eyes—not better or worse than my old ones, just different. Through these pixelated lenses, I see the world as more complex, more interconnected, more alive with possibility and danger than I ever did before.

This is perhaps the ultimate paradox of the tick as teacher: through its parasitism, it creates new forms of awareness. By disrupting our normal functioning, it forces us to develop new ways of being, new forms of attention, new kinds of relationships with our own bodies and with the more-than-human world. Transformation of umwelt, even when unwanted, can lead to new forms of understanding, as we learn to inhabit a perceptual world where boundaries between self and other become increasingly porous—for worse, or for better.

A transformation of perspective through encounter with a supposedly invasive species reveals something profound about our current ecological predicament. We tend to view invasive species as enemies to be eliminated, much like we view disease-causing bacteria as invaders to be destroyed. But perhaps these species we label as “invasive” are actually cathartic in the classical sense—they bring about a clarifying crisis that reveals hidden truths about our current situation.

Like the tick, other species we consider invasive often thrive precisely in the landscapes we have disturbed: kudzu growing over abandoned lots, zebra mussels colonizing artificial waterways. They are not so much invaders as indicators, showing us where we have created the conditions for ecological upheaval.

These examples force us to confront our own role as the ultimate “invasive species.” Humans have altered nearly every ecosystem on Earth, yet we reserve our harshest judgment for others that thrive in those same disrupted environments. Are these organisms truly invasive, or are they simply more visible participants in the great reshuffling of life that characterizes the Anthropocene?

Pixelated Reality

The tick’s ability to adapt and persist mirrors the resilience of life in the face of human-driven change. Like other species labeled as invasive, it teaches us that life finds ways to continue and to create new relationships even in drastically altered conditions. These species may be unwanted teachers, but they offer crucial lessons about the impossibility of maintaining rigid boundaries in an interconnected world.

Haraway’s dilemma—how to enter into ethical relation with blood-sucking parasites—may not have a satisfactory resolution. But maybe that’s not the point. Maybe the tick’s gift is precisely this unresolvable tension, the necessity of learning to live with and learn from creatures that transform us against our will. In this era of ecological crisis, as we face the necessity of other radical transformations in how we relate to the more-than-human world, the tick’s lessons about adaptation and the inevitability of change become increasingly relevant.

I still carry the tick’s mark in my altered vision. But I’ve come to see this not as a deficit, but as a different way of perceiving reality—one that perhaps comes closer to seeing things as they really are: grainy, indeterminate, thoroughly entangled.

The tick has taught me that clear vision isn’t always the clearest way of seeing.

---

Featured image: An adult deer tick, the most common vector of Lyme disease. Photo by Eric Karits, 2014.

Maxime Fecteau is a Ph.D. candidate in Literary Studies at the Université du Québec à Montréal. His research examines the narrative, descriptive, and autobiographical articulation of ecological knowledge in the writings of women of science, from Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring to Suzanne Simard’s Finding the Mother Tree. His work has appeared in many anthologies, magazines and journals, including BESIDE, MuseMedusa, and Ecozon@. Contact.