Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, March 28, 1990                   TAG: 9003280540
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: B4   EDITION: EVENING 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: NORFOLK                                LENGTH: Medium

LOVE DRAWS MALE TICKS TO THEIR DEATHS

The tiny plastic device attracts lovesick male ticks and almost always seals their fate.

The pellet, just an eighth of an inch long, is the creation of Daniel Sonenshine, who says it could be a new, cheaper and more effective method of tick control for livestock. Sonenshine said the pellets would be on the market, after further testing, by 1995.

Sonenshine, who received a patent for the device last year, has tested them on dozens of rabbits and four calves, gluing up to hundreds on each animal. No tick lived to tell the tale.

"We tried it on rabbits, and we killed all the [tick] males in 30 minutes," said Sonenshine, a professor of biological sciences at ODU. "We tried it on cows and we killed all the males in over an hour."

The device, said Sonenshine, is "not dependent on visual clues; it's dependent on chemical clues." The oval-shaped pellets are coated with synthetically made pheromones, chemicals emitted by the female to attract a sexual partner.

The male ticks, overwhelmed by the aphrodisiac, mount the pellets, which then release a lethal dose of pesticide.

Sonenshine's laboratory is teeming with tens of thousands of ticks housed in covered beakers. Sonenshine has spent 30 years studying the insects.

He has researched the spread of Rocky Mountain spotted fever, a tick-borne disease causing fever in humans, and has injected ticks with radioactive material to track their migration. The tick terminator, which Sonenshine describes as his first purely practical project, grew out of recent research on pheromones.

"It became obvious that these little pests are driven by chemicals," he said. "All the communication between them is by these chemicals." Ticks emit pheromones not only to initiate sexual encounters, but also to alert one another to food sources, he said.

Tick-borne diseases like cattle fever - which produces malaria-like symptoms - cost ranchers and farmers around the world $7 billion to $9 billion annually, Sonenshine said.

Currently, he said, livestock are usually sprayed with pesticide or given pesticide baths to ward off ticks. But Sonenshine said his method would provide advantages over those techniques.

For one, it would be cheaper. The spray and bathing techniques must be performed weekly, but the pellets would not need to be replaced for more than a month.

The pellet, he said, also would be more effective in killing ticks. Unlike the other methods, it would attract more to the pesticide using the pheromones and would disrupt their reproductive cycle.