SSS 2012-06-18（在线收听）

 Deer tick and Lime disease go hand in hand in some places but you can't always put blame on Bambi. Because new research shows the incidence of Lime disease tracks less with the abundance of deer than those with disappearance of foxes. The study is in the proceeding of National Academy of Sciences. To see where foxes come in, you have to look at the tick life cycle. When deer ticks are young, they feed on small mammals like the white foot mouse.It's from infected rodents that ticks pick up the bacterial that causes Lyme disease. Foxes, of course, pray on mouse and other small mammals so fewer foxes mean more mice and potential more disease. To come up with that connection, researchers modeled the relative contributions of various populations in areas where Lyme disease is rough.   And they found in New York State, for one,the incidence of Lyme could be directly predicted by the death of foxes.