Trapping Ticks, the Ticktog Design
On the Elizabeth Islands we have been trying to find solutions to our tick troubles for a hundred and fifty years. Permethrin has been a game changer, as a magic bullet that does in all three of our tick species.
The keys are treating clothing with the permethrin and then wearing the right clothes so that ticks cannot sneak through. Our “achilles heel” is the gaps between pants, socks and shoes. Ticks usually hop onto a walker on the lower leg and foot, they don’t climb trees and fall out. So the number one area to protect is from the knee down.
Socks and gaiters each have limitations that ticks can work around if they are not overcome by the permethrin treatment. Gaiters start above the shoe and end at the knee, so any tick that gets above or below a gaiter may find skin. Socks are knit, not woven, and use thick yarns, so when they stretch over your foot and calf the mesh opens wide. Baby ticks are under one millimeter wide, and the holes in socks are that big and bigger. We have seen baby lone star ticks penetrate treated socks again and again.
Ticktogs are designed to beat socks by being made from ultra-tight-woven non-stretch parachute fabric, whose holes are a tenth of a millimeter wide. Those holes are ten times smaller than the holes in a sock’s weave and more than five times smaller than a baby tick (smaller than even the smallest pest, the larval chigger).
Ticktogs are designed to beat gaiters by stopping ticks heading down and up. Heading down a TIcktog a tick finds no open skin because the Ticktog covers the whole foot in an unbroken barrier from toe to knee. Heading up, a climbing tick ends up under the turndown at the top, where the fabric folds back over the strap. This tick-trap prevents access above the knee and the tick drops off after too much permethrin exposure. Furthermore, permethtrin is the only thing stopping the tick from getting through or around a gaiter or sock. If the pernmethrin is faded with age or sun exposure, ticks are free to do their end run. Not so with ticktogs: ticks are physically blocked at every turn.
