Modern humans are not accustomed to being eaten. Squirrels and rabbits generally leave us alone. Birds prefer eating bugs and seeds. Even bears and mountain lions would rather shop elsewhere for food. As the world’s apex predators, people ought to be the scariest species. But ticks hunt us relentlessly for the chance to suck our blood. According to the Department of Natural Resources, in Iowa, emergency room visits for tick bites is the highest it’s been in ten years.

Going to the emergency room for a bug bite may sound extreme but it is pretty horrifying to be shampooing your hair and feel a tick the size of a grape stuck to your scalp. Everything about ticks is creepy. You don’t see them. You don’t even usually feel them because they first inject an anesthetic before they bite. Ticks don’t fly. They don’t jump. They are incredibly slow walkers. So, what is the secret of their success?

It’s patience. Unlike us, ticks don’t need to eat every day. A tick can go months or even years without eating. Ticks don’t freeze in the winter. Sometimes you can see one crawling through the snow in February. A tick is practically unsquishable. You can run over it with a car and it just keeps walking. Ticks have been around for 90 million years and probably preyed on dinosaurs. When a tick finally gets attached to a person or a dog, it can stay there guzzling until it grows to 100 times its original size. A tick the size of an apple seed can balloon up as big as a golf ball—like somebody who has stayed too long at Golden Corral’s all-you-can-eat buffet.

Technically ticks aren’t bugs. They are in the spider family—which may help explain their patience. Ticks don’t build webs but, like spiders, they are ambush predators. And, like spiders, they have eight legs. They wait in trees for something to walk by and when they smell sweat or carbon dioxide, they drop. You have to wonder how often they miss their target and then have to slowly crawl for days all the way back up the tree for another try.

Ticks can carry more than 15 diseases, including Lyme disease. Some ticks secrete neurotoxins that temporarily paralyze their victim. The Lone Star tick can carry alpha-gal-syndrome which makes its victim allergic to eating red meat— a sad thing in cattle country.

Removing a tick from your skin requires a little nerve. One method is to burn it with a match head until it falls off. This often results in burning the person and is not recommended. The best method is to pull the tick off with tweezers. As tempting as it is to drop the blood-sucking vermin into the toilet and send it on the journey it deserves, doctors recommend saving it to test for possible diseases. Plus, flushing a tick wouldn’t kill it and who wants to get bitten by a tick that just spent a month crawling out of a sewer?