National Tick Collection Now Available Digitally

July 1, 2014

Georgia Southern is famous for many things – our six time national football championships, our beautiful college campus, our accomplished student body and talented faculty and staff – and our world famous tick collection. Now represented in the Zach S. Henderson Library’s institutional repository known as Digital Commons, not to be confused with Dining Commons, the first series of the  U.S. National Tick Collection can be viewed in an interactive identification key featuring the Hard Ticks of the Eastern United States. Other species will be added to the website in the future. “Digital Commons is a place where we can show off the research, scholarship and creative works of Georgia Southern,” said Ashley Lowery, digital collections specialist with Zach S. Henderson Library. “It’s a platform to showcase what faculty, staff and students are producing.” Housed at Georgia Southern since 1990, the U.S. National Tick collection is one of the largest curated tick collections in the world, containing specimens from all continents, including most of the approximately 860 known species of ticks and a quarter of the primary tick types. The collection belongs to the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. View the collection.