Has anyone seen anything like this? The female Ornithodoros turicata engorged on a mouse and this is how I found it after taking off the animal. Normally this doesn't happen and nothing protrudes from the genital opening after a female tick is fed. My guess is this is a pathology of some kind. Perhaps because of the internal pressure generated by the sucking action the vestibular vagina prolapsed/everted somehow... Any ideas?
Interesting! It is look like a larva of parasitic wasp. I do not know there is species targeting argasidae, but ixodid ticks sometimes parasitized by this kind of wasp larva. Hope it helps.
Thanks. I don't think it's a wasp larva, the protruding thing is clearly a part of the tick and not a different organism. I haven't heard about argasid-specific parasitoids either but that would be cool to find something like that one day. For now, I am sticking to my first version that this happened due to the great positive pressure a tick generates while sucking. Perhaps such specimens (this is not a single occurrence) have problems with musculature normally holding the reproductive tract in place...
I think that Serge's version is logical. The question is whether this is a unique case just with that specimen of tick.
It's not a single case. So far I have seen it in 4 females, all from long-term colonies, so my hypothesis is this might have to do something with the inbreeding. It has probably been going on for a while and I noticed it only because my experiments require closely following individual ticks...
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