The whole my life — from early childhood more than fifty years ago until today — I have spent a great deal of time in the forest. In my childhood I often walked there with my dogs. Even now we keep two to four dogs and live in the forest year‑round. From those early years I hardly remember any problems with ticks, either on myself or on the dogs. Perhaps I encountered none, or only a few ticks during the entire warm season, and they rarely bit me or my dogs. Consequently, our dogs were never sick with pyroplasmosis.
Nowadays, we find ticks on our clothes every single day. They bite us almost daily, and we remove many of them from our dogs. If the dogs are not treated with acaricides in time, they fall ill with pyroplasmosis and must be treated by the local veterinarian — otherwise they would die. There is no doubt about that.
What about wolves in such a situation?
From camera‑trap photos and videos of wolves, we record ticks on them regularly, especially visible around the eyes. While checking pups at wolf dens (almost one hundred dens found in total), we observed that approximately 30% to 90% of pups had ticks. In some cases (about 3–10%), the number of ticks on a single pup was high — ten or more.
It is clear that some wolf pups become sick with pyroplasmosis and perhaps die from it. This remains weakly studied. However, this factor may significantly contribute to the very high early‑season mortality of wolf pups reported in our previous work, which is mainly caused by predation from lynx, brown bear, bison, elk, and red deer (Sidorovich & Rotenko, 2019).
Zoology by Vadim Sidorovich 