A Leg Up

Entomologist Stays One Jump Ahead Of Harmful Ticks

Angela James’ choice of vocation used to give her late grandmother a good chuckle.

“My grandmother, just before she passed on, still couldn’t believe I was an entomologist,” said James (`85). “Growing up, when I would visit with them in summer, we’d pick black eyed peas and tomatoes, and so on. She used to say, ‘You were always scared of all the bugs. You’d go running in the opposite direction!’”

James’ opinion of certain “bugs” is still not positive, but today she deals with them in a very different way. “It’s really about what can we do to prevent disease transmission to either humans or animals,” she said.

After living in Florida, South Carolina, Illinois, Tennessee, California and Mississippi, it was fortuitous that James’ father, a 30-year U.S. Navy submariner, closed out his career at Naval Submarine Base Kings Bay in St. Marys, Ga., where she completed high school. Based on James’ aptitude for science and interest in animals, her senior biology teacher recommended Georgia Southern.

That advice delivered James straight into the tutelage of world-renowned tick and mite expert James Oliver.

“I interviewed with Dr. Oliver and was hired as a work study student in his acarology lab,” she said. “That’s what started my interest in entomology. I worked as a technician and got a biology degree at Georgia Southern. He asked me if I’d be interested in continuing as a graduate student and I worked with him while getting my master’s degree, too.”

Like Oliver, her specialty is acarology – the study of ticks, which are one of the leading carriers of diseases afflicting both humans and animals.

James is the only acarologist within Veterinary Services assigned to the Centers for Epidemiology and Animal Health, an epidemiological unit within the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. “Veterinary Services was very interested in my association with Georgia Southern and the Smithsonian Institute’s U.S. National Tick Collection there,” she said. “In addition to my expertise in tick biology and ecology, Lyme disease, and my post-doctoral studies at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in serology, and Colorado State University studying gene flow in mosquitoes.”

James works out of APHIS headquarters in Fort Collins, Colo.

Veterinary Services wanted to develop a better understanding of tick distribution within the U.S., said James, and wanted to start a national program to document where ticks are prevalent, thus where certain animals – cattle, horses, sheep or goats – are going to be exposed to diseases being transmitted by ticks.

James has continued to work with Lorenza Beati, curator of the tick collection at Georgia Southern and collaborates with her and the Veterinary Services laboratory in Ames, Iowa, which also has a tick collection database of information on tick distribution. “I’ve combined these two national databases and I use this to monitor changes in tick distribution – where the ticks are,” said James. “I’ve gotten additional training. I’m a geospacial analyst, so I use Geographic Information System tools to analyze what the habitats look like for these different tick species.

“My early role as a master’s student here at Georgia Southern was dealing with tick ecology. I incorporated those experiences with my new experiences here with USDA, using geospatial tools, so now I’m able to do some modeling and mapping for Veterinary Services at both national and local scales to help design strategies for surveillance and prevention of tick-borne disease in the U.S.”