Occurring in semi-desert areas of Africa, Saudi Arabia and other parts of the Persian Gulf, India, Sri Lanka and into Asia, it is able to survive for lengthy periods without feeding, spending most of its life burrowed under sand or loose soil, often in wait for animals that rest or sleep under trees or in the lee of rocks, but also in places where people or their animals congregate such as marketplaces, places of worship, cattle kraals and village squares.

Their feeding method differs from that of the hard ticks in that they do not embed a capitulum in the host, but make an incision through the skin and sip the oozing blood.

Sand tampans by their concerted attack in large numbers are able to paralyse and kill sizeable mammals, especially penned livestock, by introducing toxins during feeding, mainly through coxal gland secretions, leading to symptoms similar to those of anaphylactic shock in older animals.

O. coriaceus occurs under hillside scrub oak from northern California and Nevada to Mexico, in deer beds under trees and in the lee of large rocks.

[16] O. savignyi was named after the zoologist Marie Jules César Lelorgne de Savigny, a contemporary of Jean Victoire Audouin's.

"Dispersal of the ancestral viruses of AHFV and KFDV may have been accomplished through the movement of animals, including camels presumably carrying ticks, along the Silk Road, which by the 1300s stretched from Europe to China.

"[10] The coxal secretion of adult female ticks, appearing during and after a blood meal, contains a sex pheromone provoking a mating response from males.

Although experiments using salivary gland proteins achieved mixed results, an approach using gut antigens was more promising, inducing a protective response in pigs, decreasing female fecundity in 50% and causing up to 80% mortality in nymphs (Manzano-Román et al. 2012a)[19]