You probably get bitten by mosquitoes
a couple of times a year.
And there's a good chance
you've been stung by a hornet at least
once in your life.
But one creature
you don't want to get bitten by
is this thing.
This is a tick.
And just one tick bite
can affect you for the rest of your life.
So what would it be like
to get bitten by 1 million of them?
Ticks can't jump or fly.
Instead, they wait on tall pieces of grass
for something to come by that
they can start biting.
Then they latch onto their host,
and find a thin piece of skin
they can extract blood from.
So what would being bitten by
just a single tick feel like?
Well, one of the scariest parts of
being bitten by a single tick,
is that you wouldn't feel it at all,
at least not as it happens.
These things are so small
that they can stay on your body for days
without being detected.
So one bite wouldn't bother you,
but what about a couple of hundred tick bites?
If this were to happen,
you still might not feel all the ticks
piercing into your skin.
Instead, you'd feel hundreds of these creatures
crawling around your body.
Even with a couple of hundred ticks on you,
it would be hours before you began to feel the effects.
That's because
ticks usually take hours to find their feeding spot
on your body.
Once they choose a spot,
they'll begin to suck your blood.
They'd feed on you for a couple of hours.
You'd begin to feel light-headed,
and maybe even nauseous from the blood you've lost.
And tick saliva has anticoagulants,
which will thin your blood,
making you bleed even more.
If you had 5,000 ticks drinking your blood,
the blood loss could kill you.
That's because an average tick
can suck up to 1 ml of your blood.
And you have up to 5,500 ml (1.2 gal) of blood in your body.
But they'd need to feed on you for hours to do that.
The good thing about a tick bite
is it doesn't happen instantly.
Instead, these bites are a long process
and can take up to 48 hours before the tick
is finished drinking your blood.
If a million ticks attacked you,
that would feel pretty terrible.
If they fed on you for long enough,
you would certainly die.
Not to mention that all that extra weight on your body
would probably suffocate you.
But if you did happen to get medical attention fast enough,
and got all the ticks off of you,
then there's a good chance you'd be OK.
Once you reached the hospital,
dozens of doctors and nurses would have to carefully find,
and remove, every single tick from your body.
That's because after the ticks latch on,
they start to burrow into your skin.
They're not something you can easily just brush off.
Instead, it requires a precise extraction
to get them out of you.
It would take hours,
maybe even days,
to get every single tick off your body.
Throughout this process, you'd continue to lose blood.
Luckily, if you removed them fast enough,
you'd end up surviving.
But if you leave just a single tick on your body,
the consequences could be devastating.
One tick drinking your blood
would be the least of your worries.
Ticks can give you plenty of other health problems,
including Lyme disease.
This tick-borne illness would make you incredibly fatigued,
and could lead to joint pain and heart issues.
You could end up bedridden
from just a single tick bite.
And this could last for years if not treated properly.
So if you didn't manage to get every single tick off you,
there's a good chance you'd end up with Lyme disease.
And even after treatment,
you could still experience symptoms like
difficulty thinking and continued fatigue.
So just a single tick bite could change your entire life.
Now if you ever find yourself walking
in some tall, grassy fields,
remember to check everywhere on your body
for any ticks afterwards.
And we mean everywhere.
Ticks can hide in your hair,
your armpits,
and even your groin.
Being bitten by ticks sure does suck.
But how do they compare to murder hornets?
Well, we'll leave that story for another WHAT IF.