The Sunday News
AFTER witnessing the distressing effect of fowl tampans (amahonondo or amakulugwi) on the indigenous chickens of one passionate poultry farmer, Mr Stuart Dube in Plumtree, I thought we should discuss these ectoparasites this week.
The fowl tampans are also commonly known as chicken ticks. They are similar to cattle tick but attack only chickens. The tampan is about 3mm long and visible to the naked eye. These suck blood from chickens causing severe discomfort and eventual mortality. The fowl tampan or tick is known scientifically as Argas persicus and commonly affects chickens, turkeys, pigeons, ducks and geese in tropical and sub-tropical countries. In Africa they are found in Egypt, Kenya, Zimbabwe, and Nigeria. They are found on the skin, especially the nymphs and larval stages but most of the time the ticks hide in cracks and crevices in houses, market stalls and sheds or under tree bark away from the host.
The fowl tampans are introduced in your fowl run through infected chickens coming from elsewhere. The adult tampans are nocturnal which means they feed at night. They come out of hiding from the cracks and crevices and start sucking blood from chickens during the night. When daylight comes the adult tampans return to the cracks for hiding. The unfed adult tick is pale yellow, turning reddish brown when fed.
The symptoms shown by affected birds are usually due to the loss of blood because the tampans suck blood from the chicken and less due to a disease. Egg production will go down in laying birds. In fact in indigenous chickens the laying birds can abandon the eggs even at the incubation stage. The chicken will be generally sick and depressed and it can die if the infestation is severe. The affected birds are ruffled, with poor appetite and diarrhoea.
It is important to understand the life cycle of fowl ticks as this will help in controlling them. Females lay eggs in the cracks and crevices they occupy. The eggs are usually in batches of 30 to 100 or even more. They lay several batches of eggs and produce an average of 700 to 800 eggs during their lifetime. A blood meal is needed to produce each batch of eggs. This is the blood that is drawn from your chickens. Eggs hatch in 2 to 4 weeks and 6-legged tick larvae appear. Larvae are active day or night and readily seek a host. After attaching to the host (your chickens), the larvae will feed for 5-6 days. This means your chicken which has been attacked by the larvae will be sucked blood for almost a week, keeping in mind that more than 60 larvae will be produced from the eggs. So your chicken will have more than 60 parasites sucking blood from its body. These will appear like black small ticks if you pluck the dead bird and they will be attached all over the body with high concentration under the wings.
The larvae will then drop from the host and molt to the nymphal stage. Nymphs have 8 legs and feed only at night for short periods. After two more nymphal molts, the ticks reach the adult stage. Under favourable conditions, the time from egg to adult is approximately 30 days. Adult ticks completely engorge on hosts in 30 to 45 minutes. They are extremely resistant to starvation and can live more than a year without a blood meal. This means even if you remove your chickens from the fowl run for a year or two and you don’t destroy the fowl run, the ticks will resurface again when you put in a fresh batch of chickens even after two years!
Treatment of tampans is not easy because of their nocturnal habits. Treatment should be split into two, firstly treating the birds especially for the engorged larvae. This can be done using dust insecticides which are obtainable from animal drugs shop. The insecticide can also be applied at places where free range chickens like to take a dust bath so that they take in the chemical when they do the dust bath. Some farmers say they use light sprays of the livestock dipping chemicals and they say this gives great results in controlling fowl tick larvae. The second treatment should be done on the poultry housing itself. This should be meticulously done with deliberate attention being given to cracks and crevices because these are the hiding places for the tampans during the day. Again a dipping chemical is very effective here and the poultry housing should be thoroughly sprayed covering every surface and crack. This might need to be repeated after one week so as to break the life cycle of the tampans. Nesting material should be removed and burnt or buried.
I hope this will help especially smallholder poultry farmers who are producing indigenous chickens. The fowl tampans can be stubborn and stressful if you don’t know how to get rid of them from your unit.
