Thanks to colloid chemistry, ticks can suck our blood at their leisure. By chance, two groups from Maastricht and Wageningen were the first to shed light on this, as they report in Nature Chemistry.

‘No, we would never say that we now know how ticks attach themselves’, says Wageningen researcher Siddharth Deshpande. ‘At most, that is what SpringerNature has made of it.’ What he and his Maastricht colleague Ingrid Dijkgraaf have published in Nature Chemistry, however, is a study showing that at least one common protein in tick saliva can divide into two liquid phases. The most concentrated phase can then solidify into a gel. Deshpande readily admits that this does not prove that this is the mechanism that makes a tick stick for days – but it can hardly be anything else.