Georgia Southern house hosts tick collection

STATESBORO - Like a menagerie of tiny army men, three thousand gold-covered ticks stand upright in active positions on dime-sized platforms in a house at Georgia Southern University in Statesboro. <br> <br> Nearby is one of the most complete repositories of written knowledge on the tick, dating back to Homer, 800 BC. <br> <br> Hundreds of thousands more of the bloodsucking creatures are tucked away in government-issue metal filing cabinets. <br> <br> The Smithsonian&#39;s little-known U.S. National Tick Collection is stored in a former home-economics demonstration house at Georgia Southern. The collection&#39;s curators -- the world&#39;s foremost authorities of tick identification -- are in charge of more than one million dead ticks that represent more than 700 of the 850 known species. <br> <br> Curator James Keirans says, ``It&#39;s an important historical document; you never know when a new outbreak of disease will occur. Ticks transmit more disease to man and animals than any other arthropod and are second only to mosquitoes in pathogenic agents to humans.&#39;&#39; <br> <br> The collection -- touted as the world&#39;s largest -- spans nearly a century to America&#39;s first encounters with tick-borne Rocky Mountain spotted fever in the Bitterroot Valley of western Montana.