Pete Teel

Areas of Expertise

• Tick Biology
• Tick Ecology
• Tick Management associated with livestock, wildlife, companion animals, and humans.

Professional Summary

Pete Teel, Ph.D., leads research projects focused on the biology, ecology and management of ticks associated with livestock, wildlife, companion animals, and humans for AgriLife Research. Much of his work centers on interactions of ticks with their hosts, host-driven dispersal of ticks to habitats, and climate interactions with habitat type and quality on tick survivorship during the long off-host periods of their life history. These interactions drive tick dispersal, population dynamics, and challenges tick control strategies. His work centers in part on issues surrounding the detection and elimination of cattle fever ticks as part of Texas A&M AgriLife Research contributions to the US Cattle Fever Tick Eradication Program. In addition, his work on non-regulatory program tick species has been designed to help ranchers/landowners use integrated pest management approaches to control ticks. Teel and colleagues have been working to improve detection of tick-infested cattle. Currently the standard is human “scratch” inspection of restrained animals, a process that is tedious, time consuming, imperfect and dangerous. They discovered there are chemical changes in manure of tick infested animals that is detectable by near infrared reflectance spectroscopy, a potentially non-invasive method of assessing tick infestations. They also discovered that tick feces left on host skin is identifiable using Raman spectroscopy, another potential tool to augment human inspection.