Gathering New Insights on Tick and Human Interactions in New York

Marie Lilly studied biology in college, at Oberlin, but it wasn’t until she was working as a forestry researcher in Wisconsin that she became interested in ticks. “I wouldn’t say I like ticks much, but I do respect ticks,” she said in a recent interview, noting that, for whatever reason, ticks have “made their way into my life at multiple stages.”

Columbia News caught up with Lilly to ask about what led her to her current work—writing a dissertation about urban tick distribution and human understanding of the risks they pose in parks in the New York City area—and what insights it can provide on how to mitigate the risk of tick borne illness.

What is your dissertation about, and what makes the questions you’re asking novel?

My dissertation is based on a survey we did over the last two summers in parks in New York City and Nassau County on Long Island. We studied what people in those parks knew and understood about ticks and how to protect themselves from them, we set camera traps to see what wildlife were in the parks, and we also collected ticks to identify which species were present and in what numbers. That combination of studying humans, ticks, and wildlife together in one study is new.

What parks did you look at?

We looked at 38 in total, including Flushing Meadows, Prospect Park, Forest Park, and Alley Pond Park.

And what did you find that stood out?

What we’ve found, to summarize, is that there are definitely some ticks in urban parks around the city and people generally don’t know a ton about their potential risk of encountering them because urban areas aren’t historically where the messaging has been. So people may be at higher risk than they think they are in these city parks of encountering ticks.

Tick presence generally seems to correlate with knowledge of ticks. We saw that in less urban areas where there have always been a lot of ticks, people know about ticks and their risk.

But for a variety of reasons, we do have more animals that can host ticks and pathogens migrating into and living in cities in recent years. So for urban residents, understanding ticks is going to become more and more important.

What’s the ultimate goal of research like this?

The ultimate goal is mitigation of tick-borne disease. If we better understand where animals are migrating, and where ticks are, and what people understand about ticks, we can plan better outreach to help people protect themselves.

What are you working on apart from your dissertation?

I’ve also been working on some small mammal trapping at a few parks in Queens and on Staten Island. We’re looking at the tick borne pathogens in the animals we trap (and then release) to get a deeper sense of what areas are important for tick expansion and emergence.

Before you came to Columbia, you went to Colombia as a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant. What brought you there?

I got interested in Spanish as a kid because I was interested in communicating with people and Spanish is the second-most spoken language in the U.S, including where I grew up, in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois. As an undergrad, I minored in Hispanic studies with an emphasis on teaching. During the Fulbright, I had the opportunity to do a lot of teaching of English for the sciences to university-age students. English is still, unfairly, the leading language of scientific publication, so I was happy to be able to help give people the tools to do science in an international context.

Spanish has also proved really useful in my research since New York has a huge Spanish-speaking population, so sometimes we’re doing our survey in Spanish and gathering data on what those speakers know about ticks.

You have a background in ecology and a deep interest in the outdoors. How do you like living in New York?

I really like the outdoors, but I also really like cities. I lived in Bogotá during my Fulbright and loved it, and then moved to San Francisco for a master’s, and loved that, too. New York also has more green spaces and wildlife than you might expect.

Do you have a favorite park in the city?

It’s hard to choose, but I think it would be Forest Park in Queens. It really does feel like a forest there.