Bug card No. 0722 of 1,500
Hedgehog tick
Ixodes hexagonus
The hedgehog tick is a small, dark brown tick that lives in hedgehog nests. It climbs onto the hedgehog to drink its blood. When it is full of blood it swells up and turns light grey or white.
Fun fact: this one is not an insect. It is an arachnid with eight legs, a cousin of the spiders.
Lives in
Central and western Europe and east to Siberia, wherever hedgehogs live
What does it eat?
It drinks the blood of hedgehogs, and sometimes of foxes, dogs and cats.
How fast is it?
Hedgehog tick about 0.02 km/h (0.01 mph)
A garden snail about 0.05 km/h (0.03 mph)
A tortoise about 0.3 km/h (0.19 mph)
A person walking about 5 km/h (3.1 mph)
cool stuff
Fun facts
1
It spends most of its life inside the hedgehog's cosy nest, safe from bad weather.
2
Like spiders, it has eight legs, because ticks are cousins of spiders.
3
The girl has a shield on her back shaped like a heart or a six-sided hexagon.
you asked
Most asked questions about Hedgehog tick
?Where do hedgehog ticks live?
Mainly inside hedgehog nests in Europe.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Ixodes hexagonus
- Group
- Scorpions, ticks and friends
- Family
- Ixodidae
- Classification
- Arachnida > Ixodida > Ixodidae
- Lives on
- Europe, Asia
Where the facts come from
- Ixodes hexagonus (Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0): what it looks like, where it lives, what it eats, sizes and fun facts, retold in simple words.
- Picture by André Karwath aka Aka. CC BY-SA 2.5, Wikimedia Commons. The round sticker of this bug is cut from the same picture.
If we got something wrong, sorry, we are bug fans, not a science journal. Tell us at [email protected] and we will fix it.
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