Eyeless Tampan

• It is the main vector of African swine fever, a disease that has killed hundreds of millions of pigs worldwide.
• It also transmits African relapsing fever, caused by the bacterium Borrelia duttonii.
• Unlike the hard ticks, which feed for days, this one feeds in minutes and can survive for years between one meal and the next.
• It is a soft tick and a fast feeder: it takes a painless blood meal in about thirty minutes, almost always at night, and leaves. Nothing like the hard ticks, which stay for days.
• It is the natural vector of African swine fever, which in Africa circulates between these ticks and the warthogs in whose burrows they live.
• Its longevity is key to that disease: being long-lived, it keeps the virus in the focus for years.
• It also transmits human relapsing fever, caused by Borrelia duttonii, for which it is both vector and the only known reservoir: no mammalian reservoir is known.
• Both pathogens pass from mother to eggs, which perpetuates the infection in the tick population without any need for reinfection.

Skeleton type

Invertebrate - chitin exoskeleton (arachnid)

Habitat and environment

Cracks in the floors and walls of houses and pens in sub-Saharan Africa

Sources consulted: Trends in Parasitology (2025) · Pereira de Oliveira et al. (2019), PLOS ONE · Trape et al. (2013), PLOS ONE · ScienceDirect (Hughes 1989) · Science Advances, How colonial animals evolve · Wikipedia, Zooid