These are older pictures, so we can just look at Google Earth.

The difference between the two habitats is still pretty obvious.

If we look at a topographical map, we can see that the two sides of the river are VERY different.

On the West side, there's a lot of mountains.

The East side is flatter, less mountainous, and is just a completely different habitat.

However, ticks can also pass germs onto their eggs through their ovaries.

This is called horizontal, or transovarial transmission.

Both of these are important to RMSF’s survival, because dual transmission increases the chance of completing another cycle in the wild.

There’s two ways that a tickborne disease can be transmitted.

The first one is the one that everyone’s familiar with.

An infected tick bites a host, and passes the germ onto a new generation of ticks when new individuals feed.

This is horizontal transmission.

He named this bacteria after himself, Rickettsia rickettsii.

The disease would go on to be well studied, and go by a few other names. However, over time, the scientific community settled on a name originally published in 1903.

Rocky Mountian Spotted Fever

So he drew blood from William Langdon, stained it with a chemical called Eosin, and found bacteria.

He dissected ticks in the area, found the bacteria.

He also found that he could pass the disease among guinea pigs.

He also found bacteria in tick eggs.

web.archive.org/web/20110722...

At the same time as this was going on, a young microbiologist by the name of Howard Taylor Ricketts set up shop in the area.

With few laboratory supplies-all of his experiments were done in a tent-he began to look for the cause of this perplexing disease.

The disease remained mysterious, until two doctors L.P. Macalla and H.A. Bereton had a patient who was bitten by a tick.

One which looked a lot like the one below.

That patient later developed the symptoms described in the post above.

Not much was known about this disease until the early 1800s, when the state board of health brought in Louis Wilson and William Chowning to investigate.

They did a lot of research on the disease, eventually creating the map below.

When the first white settlers arrived in Montana, the native Salish people warned them to not settle the West side of the Bitterroot River.

Ignoring these warnings, a small group of people colonized that side of the river.

Three quarters-75%-died of a mysterious disease.

#DeepDive

Reaaaaaaally trying to fit these into my MtG decks at the moment.

Unfortunately, they're not the GREATEST cards because Hornet Queen is really expensive and Hornet's Nest requires a lot of 1/1 counters to make an impactful amount of wasps.

Still awesome cards, though.