Martha’s Vineyard has a tick problem. In just a few years, the island has seen an explosion of the lone star tick, a faster and more aggressive arachnid than deer ticks, which have swept the island and carried with them alpha gal syndrome, a tick-borne illness that causes an allergy to meat from hoofed animals and has become the talk of the Vineyard.

Last year, Martha’s Vineyard Hospital reported 742 positive alpha-gal tests, up from just two in 2020. As of June, there have been another 416 positive tests on the Vineyard, according to the most recent available data. Some restaurants on the Vineyard have even changed their menus to appeal to an alpha gal stricken clientele. While lone star ticks have made their way to Nantucket, they have not taken off here the way they have on the Vineyard—not even close. So why does Martha’s Vineyard have hundreds of cases and Nantucket only 26?

“Nantucket has a tenth as many lone star ticks as Martha’s Vineyard has,” said Tufts University Professor Sam Telford, who has been studying ticks on Nantucket since 1985. “People are getting bitten by lone star ticks on Nantucket and they will get alpha gal. Whether this worsens to the point where [Nantucket] becomes the next Martha’s Vineyard is yet to be certain, but that relies on my hope that the community and the town will do something about it.”

Like the blacklegged deer ticks that have spread across Nantucket—and carry Lyme disease—adult lone star ticks rely primarily on deer as their source of food, called a “blood meal.” Unlike deer ticks, lone star ticks can move quickly and can tolerate hot sand and low grasses, making them a risk not just to ecologists in the field but everyday dog walkers, trail runners and beachgoers. Lone star ticks are also prolific. A female lone star tick can lay up to 3,500 eggs in a so-called tick bomb, compared to 2,000 from a single deer tick. And they transmit alpha-gal, something not present in blacklegged deer ticks.

With an estimated 10,000 deer on Nantucket then, it may sound surprising that the lone star tick issue hasn’t become catastrophic. Ecologists warn if something isn’t done to mitigate the risk by culling the deer herd, the problem on Nantucket will become much worse. “Culling the deer would for sure reduce the number of ticks on the island, but you would have to drastically reduce the number of deer on the island,” Nantucket Conservation Foundation ecologist Danielle O’Dell said. “Hunting alone is not making a noticeable difference. To make a noticeable difference, we would have to take drastic measures to bring the population down.”

Last year, hunters on Nantucket killed 1,003 deer in an expanded hunting season—more than 10% of the estimated deer population—topping the previous record harvest of 879 from the previous season. Nantucket also participated in MassWildlife’s Hunters Share the Harvest program over the winter, allowing hunters to donate venison to islanders facing food insecurity through a program coordinated by Nourish Nantucket and the Land Bank, which started processing ground venison at its state-of-the-art deer abattoir late last year. To date, it has processed over 1,000 pounds of deer meat.

But to truly address the issue, thousands more deer will need to be killed, Telford said. If the 10,000 figure is correct, then Nantucket has more than 200 deer per square mile (0.66 deer for every year-round resident). Telford estimates Nantucket would need to cut that density to roughly 12-18 deer per square mile to significantly reduce the risk of tick-borne illness.

But Martin Feehan, a deer and moose biologist with the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife, argued that culling the herd alone would not be the most effective tool. That’s because the relationship between deer and lone star ticks is not directly related, he said. Lone star ticks rely on rodents as their primary host during their early larval and nymphal stages, while deer become their host during the ticks’ adult stage.

“At the adult stage, they can also be hosted by many domesticated species including cats and dogs,” Feehan said. “It’s important to note that humans can serve as a host for all three life stages for lone stars. This also means that a large rapid reduction in deer as a possible host for adult ticks would likely lead to significantly increased feeding on humans in the near term as the remaining primary available host.”

Rather than focus solely on deer, Feehan recommends utilizing other management strategies, such as an environmental chemical treatment, as well as strategies targeting rodents. Martha’s Vineyard, unlike Nantucket, has a large population of skunks, on top of rabbits and squirrels.

Patrick Roden-Reynolds, a tick biologist on Martha’s Vineyard,  has personally seen a single deer covered with over 100 lone star ticks on the island. Because lone star ticks prefer deer while they’re adults, they therefore rely on deer during their reproductive phase. “The tick control for lone stars needs to start with a balanced deer herd,” he said. “But larvae and nymphs bite all sorts of animals.” And therefore, he said, culling the deer herd cannot be the only answer. “The most effective tick control will likely involve an integrated approach that combines deer reduction with other strategies like host-targeted treatments, vaccines and habitat management.”

Todd Rainwater, a trustee of the Rainwater Charitable Foundation and a Nantucket summer resident, believes the solution is even more simple. His idea: kill all the deer. “They’re non-native,” he said. “We’re doing a good thing by removing the deer because they’re not supposed to be there.”

While it might sound like a drastic measure, there is some precedent for it. Monhegan Island, a five-square-mile fishing outpost with a summer tourism season, had become so inundated with deer and Lyme disease in the mid-90s that residents voted to bring in a sharpshooter to kill off every last deer on the island. Only two cases of Lyme disease have been reported there since, but it is important to note that these areas are vastly smaller than Nantucket.

Another project with similar results was conducted a decade earlier on Great Island, a peninsula in Yarmouth, where a herd of more than 50 deer were wiped out, though deer have since come back to the peninsula. On Staten Island, bucks are given vasectomies to keep their numbers at bay. Whether it’s expanding the hunting season regularly or eradicating the population altogether, Telford argues it’s time for drastic measures.

“If you didn’t have the deer and if people had been doing something about the deer population on Nantucket 40 years ago, then perhaps you would never have seen the lone star ticks,” he said. “That’s where the effort should be, to attack the source of their blood meal.”

Still, the proposal of a sharpshooter—and an incinerator to process the deer—would likely become a radioactive political measure. “The idea of incinerating the entire deer [herd] is irresponsible and I doubt MassWildlife would issue any permits unless the venison from the deer was being distributed to the community,” Roden-Reynolds said. “Otherwise, I think an incinerator could be useful for disposing of bones, hides and entrails."