Is this tick or spider?
I found this bug in my back yard and walls outside of my house. Can you help me identify? I was worried if this is a tick.
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This is definitely a tick. If it were a spider it would appear that the legs all come from a central point, as spider bodies are separated into segments, whereas tick bodies are not.
There are two main types of ticks - hard ticks and soft ticks. They look quite different. Hard ticks have what's known as a scutum (translates to shield) that covers the front half of the animal, while soft ticks lack the scutum. This one is a hard tick.
More specifically what you have here is, most likely, a male American dog tick (Dermacentor variabilis). I say this because of the pattern on the scutum and the leg color, other similar species have different color legs.
This post was sourced from https://outdoors.stackexchange.com/a/22610. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
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