The “Vegan Vampire” Tick Terrorizing Martha’s Vineyard

It’s a story Hollywood has told before: A fearsome predator with a taste for human blood terrorizes an island off the coast of Massachusetts, threatening to ruin the summer tourist season as residents scramble to figure out how to deal with the problem. There’s even a shaggy-bearded off-islander, an academic expert who has arrived to help find a solution.

Except this predator isn’t a 25-foot, three-ton great white shark. It’s a tick about the size of a poppy seed. And while its bite probably won’t kill you, it could make you allergic to red meat and dairy — the symptoms can range from mild stomach distress to full anaphylactic shock — which, to some Vineyard foodies, might seem worse than death.

Life on Martha’s Vineyard, the celebrity enclave where Spike Lee, Larry David, Meg Ryan, Ted Danson and Mary Steenburgen, and Barack and Michelle Obama have all owned homes — and where Steven Spielberg once filmed Jaws — has been upended by the arrival of the lone star tick and the alpha-gal syndrome its bite can cause.

The epidemic has left residents wondering when it will be safe to go back into their own backyards, trading shorts and flip-flops for insecticide-treated pants and socks, and reworking restaurant menus while inspiring an abundance of harebrained schemes for dealing with the problem like an outdoor Roomba for ticks (no joke).

Previously confined largely to the Southeast, the lone star tick — identifiable by the white dot on its back — began migrating north and west in the 1980s, but its population started exploding around 2011, about the same time scientists identified alpha-gal syndrome as a condition. The Vineyard has proved especially hospitable: Despite its image as a crowded beach resort, much of the island’s interior remains thick forest, wild fields and overgrown thickets that are home to a huge deer population on which the ticks love to feast.

The island has seen cases of alpha-gal skyrocket in recent years. In 2020, Martha’s Vineyard Hospital ran just nine alpha-gal tests; last year, it ran more than 1,600, with 44 percent coming back positive. And those are only the tests conducted at MVH. Experts believe the real number is much higher since the figure doesn’t include summer residents who get tested back home.

Complicating matters further are what tick epidemiologist Lea Hammer calls the “consistently inconsistent” symptoms and reactions, which vary widely from person to person. The common denominator is an allergy to red meat, but some people get hit with the double whammy of meat and dairy. Many who are bitten never develop an allergic reaction at all, while others become so sensitive that merely smelling hamburger smoke can set off a painful response. Sometimes the allergy doesn’t appear until days or weeks after the initial tick bite, which is why alpha-gal is often misdiagnosed as food poisoning. For some, symptoms don’t set in until hours after eating meat; in other cases, the allergy can fade over time, returning people to normal, or it can persist for years.

All of this has forced the island to reorient itself. Restaurants are introducing alpha-gal-friendly menus and tweaking recipes to accommodate the allergic. Red Cat Kitchen in Oak Bluffs replaced the buttermilk brine in its popular fried chicken with mustard, while Pawnee House flags an array of alpha-gal-friendly dishes — including salmon Wellington and falafel burgers — with an “AG” on its menu. Chilmark General Store, already part of Vineyard lore as the site of David’s 2021 confrontation with Trump supporter Alan Dershowitz, has introduced a cheeseless, alpha-gal-safe version of its popular pizza. Even coffee shops — and the island seems to have nearly as many of them as deer — have gotten into the mix with dairy-free iterations of cookies and pastries.

The syndrome hasn’t had a huge impact on either buyers or renters, at least according to Abby Rabinovitz, principal broker at Tea Lane Associates, who has an obvious stake in the island’s continued desirability. Rabinovitz says the threat of alpha-gal has not dissuaded buyers from purchasing homes, even in heavily wooded, tick-prone areas.

“People buy houses in one part of the island for lots of reasons,” she says, “because it’s where they’ve visited for years or friends live nearby or they like the beaches there.”

Rabinovitz, who has lived on the Vineyard full time for a quarter century, acknowledges that alpha-gal regularly comes up in conversations with her year-round friends, though she characterizes the talk as mostly practical. She compares the precautions to the earthquake preparations Angelenos take, arguing that everyone faces some hazard wherever they live and that education and common-sense preparation can help avoid the worst outcomes.

“I’m an optimist,” she says, predicting that five years from now, the situation will be much improved.

Unlike in Jaws, there’s no Quinn or Brody to come up with a simple solution ­— blowing up the enemy with a compressed-air tank isn’t much of an option when it’s the size of a freckle. But, thankfully, there is a Hooper: tick biologist Patrick Roden-Reynolds, who took over as director of the Martha’s Vineyard Tick Program in 2022. He even looks the part, dressed in safari khakis and dragging a white flag across the bushes to pick up ticks for examination.

Roden-Reynolds knows people are concerned. He has crisscrossed the island hosting educational sessions and heard everything from fearful visitors reconsidering trips to wild proposals for eliminating the ticks — including, yes, a fleet of outdoor Roombas.

“There are a lot of angry people, a lot of stressed-out people and a lot of fearful people” who are “desperate for any solution,” he acknowledges during his presentations.

His advice is straightforward: prevent tick bites, starting with long pants and long sleeves treated with permethrin. The precautions appear to work; despite wading into swarms of ticks every day for years, Roden-Reynolds has never developed alpha-gal. As for the larger problem, he argues that there is no quick fix and worries about the side effects of increased spraying. He favors culling the island’s deer population, depriving the ticks of their favorite hosts.

“You want my bold opinion?” he offered recently in an interview with Martha’s Vineyard Magazine. “I feel like we are going to have to eat our way out of the tick problem.”