American Dog Tick

Description:

This arachnid is about 1/8 inch long and is sitting at the end of a twig waiting for a suitable host to come along.

Habitat:

Typically found in or near forests and tall grass. I picked this one up while mowing the lawn, but found it while doing my daily tick check.

Notes:

OK, I'm totally creeped out after spending about 15 minutes photographing it. Fortunately our dog ticks are not particularly good diseases vectors, at least not the Lymes disease which is the tick spread disease in our area. Now I'm going to go look at some flower photos to calm down. The good news is I don't feel to bad about discarding even the most obliging of these models....