“Tell you what,” Drew Maciel told his Instagram followers in April, “I’m sick of finding dead moose.” He zoomed in on a dead bull moose lying prone on the ground, running the camera over clusters of ticks nestled within every crevice of the corpse.
Maciel is a shed hunter, meaning he collects antlers that have been naturally “shed” by wildlife. But a winter tick feeding frenzy in Maine, driven by rising temperatures, means that this year he kept finding dead animals. Up to 90 percent of the moose calves tracked by scientists in recent years have been bled to death by ticks — an ongoing crisis in a state that prizes these largest of all deer species.
But where scientists see the hand of climate change at work — average temperatures in Maine have risen 3 degrees Fahrenheit since 1985 — others see the designs of a global cabal.
“Human engineered biological warfare,” read a comment on Maciel’s video posted by Dries Van Langenhove, a far-right former member of the Belgian government who was recently convicted of violating the country’s Holocaust denial laws. The comment got 32,000 likes. “It’s Bill Gates,” someone else posted.
Chuck Lubelczyk, a vector-borne ecologist with Maine Medical Center, collects ticks at a site in Cape Elizabeth.
