When East Tennessee cattleman Travis Mundy walked through his pasture on a Saturday in early June, nothing looked out of place. He checked cattle up close, filled mineral and sprayed for flies the way he always does. By Monday, everything had changed. Within 48 hours, a healthy show heifer was dead and her pen mates were crawling with Asian longhorned ticks (ALHTs).
“We drove through them and that’s how we found her, just covered in ticks,” he recalls. “On Saturday, I had actually laid hands on her and never saw a tick or anything.”
Despite aggressive fly and parasite control, an outbreak of ALHTs killed two of Mundy’s high‑value embryo heifers and left neighboring producers with even greater losses. The fast‑spreading tick has turned routine parasite control into a high‑stakes battle.
“They explode overnight,” Mundy summarizes.
A “Perfect Storm” for Asian Longhorned Ticks
Mundy manages about 300 cows, mostly Angus, Simmental and SimAngus, spread across multiple farms in East Tennessee, about 30 miles north of Knoxville near Speedwell, Tenn.
“We’re spread out over about 10 or 11 miles, so these farms aren’t close,” he explains, emphasizing they are having tick problems in multiple locations.
This spring, the weather set up exactly the kind of conditions ticks love.
“We’ve had a drought, so we kind of let our pastures grow a little bit. We usually have them clipped before now, but we didn’t get any rain at all in May, so we kind of let them grow,” he explains. “We got 3 inches of rain Sunday and Monday; that was a perfect storm for the ticks — the wet weather, the high grass and the high humidity.”
When he and his veterinarian started pulling samples and sending them to the University of Tennessee, the results were clear: They were ALHTs.
The Hidden Threat: 300 Ticks in a Single Ear
On May 5, Mundy lost a 5-month-old calf.
“We thought at first with the weather changes and heat it was pneumonia,” he explains.
But after he and his son started clipping some of the longer haired ones in that pasture, they found a lot of ticks. “They were covered in them under thick hair and there were 200 to 300 ticks in each ear,” he says. “We were in these cattle every day, like a feet away, and you might see one or two ticks, but you couldn’t see under all that hair.”
Around that same time, they started hearing of neighbors losing cattle with confirmed necropsy of Theileria. ALHTs carry Theileria orientalis, a protozoan parasite that infects red and white blood cells, causing anemia and, in severe cases, death. Bovine theileriosis is the disease caused by Theileria orientalis.
The outbreak hit some of Mundy’s most valuable genetics.
“All three of them were show heifers, and two of them were full sib embryo babies worth a lot of money,” he says.
What surprised him most was which animals went down first. “Those show heifers were probably the best-doing, fattest, best in shape,” he says. “You would think those ticks would get on the worst, poorest animal in there and kill her first, but that’s not what happened.”
His neighbors have fared worse. “A neighbor lost seven; another guy just in the edge of Virginia he lost 20-some,” Mundy adds, noting state necropsies there came back positive for Theileria.
ALHTs carry Theileria orientalis, a protozoan parasite that infects red and white blood cells, causing anemia and, in severe cases, death. Bovine theileriosis is the disease caused by Theileria orientalis.
The tick pressure isn’t isolated to a single pasture.
“It was several pastures —four miles, two miles, 10 miles, they’re not even close, and every one of them — a couple worse than others, but they were all pretty bad,” he summarizes.
The infestation is so heavy that simply moving gates or clipping pastures can bring ticks onto people and pets. “You can walk to the gate to open the gate and you’ll have five or six crawling up your pant leg,” Mundy says. “I brought my dog with me, and I found like three on him. You just can’t keep them off either. It’s terrible.”
Control Efforts: What Helped and What Didn’t
Mundy was not ignoring parasite control before the outbreak. His program included:
- Regular permethrin sprays
- Pour-on and injectable dewormers
- IGR mineral and garlic-based mineral products
“We spray permethrin at least two or three times a week for flies,” he says. “These heifers had been poured about the 10th of May. We poured them again that night, and the next morning a lot of the ticks were dead, and we gave them injectable dewormer also.”
He also feeds an IGR mineral for flies. “They say the garlic will help with ticks,” he says. “We feed free-choice mineral every year, and it didn’t stop them.”
He has moved quickly to add new tools:
- Tick vaccine: “We ordered the tick vaccine,” he says. “All of our animals have had the first dose, and about half of them have had the second. Hopefully that tick vaccine will work and keep them from getting Theileria, and it helps kill the ticks too.”
- New pour-on product (Exzolt): “Apparently in South America it’s working on ticks, so we’re gonna try it,” Mundy adds.
Still, Mundy says producers shouldn’t expect any single product to be a silver bullet, especially given AHLTs are asexual and they can have 2,000 eggs at a time without ever encountering a male. That reproductive shortcut is a major reason populations can explode in a single season once the tick establishes in an area.
Management Lessons: Pasture Height and Fly Tags
Looking back, Mundy says pasture management and fly tags will be key parts of his long-term strategy.
“They say the best thing you can do is keep your pastures clipped, because they thrive in that high grass,” he says, adding that neighbors with thinner, more closely grazed grass “don’t have any ticks.”
He’s also going back to an older tool many had abandoned — fly tags.
“A lot of people in this country quit using fly tags several years ago,” he explains. “We kind of got away from it. But I can tell you, we’ll fly tag from now on, for sure. I can’t help but think that if we would have had a fly tag in these cattle, their ears wouldn’t have been caked full of ticks.”
His producer-to-producer advice for preparation is straightforward: Clip grass, vaccinate, worm early and fly tags.
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