"Bugs are not going to inherit the earth. They own it now. So we might as well make peace with the landlord."
- Thomas Eisner
The quote above may be in reference to insects, but I want to focus on a specific type of arthropod, and those are mites. Mites are everywhere and, despite their size, they are real movers and shakers; shaping the world in ways beyond comprehension and are an integral part of life on this planet.
Many, I would go as far as to say "most," people seem to have an aversion to mites. When people see a mite in their terrarium, I've seen even the most compassionate nature lover suddenly asking, "what's the best way to kill them?"
Perhaps it's their similarity to their vampiric cousins the ticks that sets us off. Maybe it's their potential for explosive population grow, so prolific that they seem to drip from every surface when there is a boom. Perchance it is the fact that no matter how much soap and shampoo one uses, there are species which insist on making our very bodies their homes.
It doesn't particularly matter the species, mites find little love with most people.
Granted, something about mites is just... kind of...gross and a bit unsettling. Athough I may have come to appreciate their utility and can differentiate between the bad guys vs allies, I still find them slightly off-putting at best. Springtails make me smile (with their adorable little furcula) - with mites I'm at a point where I no longer involuntarily curl my lip in disgust.
In days past, when I encountered a mite of any type there was no room for negotiation - the only option was full annihilation, and every tactic at my disposal would be employed to kill it, lest one turn into hoards.
I have had entire terrariums transform from looking like a perfect piece of Amazonian riverbank, to appearing as though a living static was coating every surface in the space of a fortnight. I vowed to never let such a tragedy occur on my watch again, and so my younger self went to enormous lengths and great pains to ensure not one mite ever found a place in my little world of terrariums and tanks again.
My house plants, once a prized collection of beautiful flora, on several occasions became tangled in nefarious webs, spider mite highways, which spread like wildfire. This too became another battleground in my ongoing war against the mites. This time the foe was even harder to contain and more difficult to eradicate. There were cherished specimens which eventually had to be consigned the garbage bin of defeat.
At the time I did not bother to learn about my enemy, only fear and hate them. I devoted an enormous amount of time and effort to keep conditions as sterile and free of mites as possible. Should a mite of any species be spotted, every effort was carried out to eliminate the potential threat.
The problem with fighting against something so small is that, with enough time, fighters will get through the defenses. Perhaps even worse, in my quest to eliminate all potential baddies, I not only eliminated innocent bystanders but allies on my side as well. My only tool was a hammer, so every mite encountered just looked like a nail. Even for the brief windows of time which my tanks or plants were certified mite free, were they actually healthier or better off? My younger, naive self would likely have declared, "yes," with little hesitation. However, just as humanity is coming to appreciate the complex and symbiotic relationships found between a number of fungi and plants species, I am coming to see that mites play a long underappreciated role in the generation and health of substrate in our tanks and soils on our planet.
After spending some time working in agriculture and horticulture, in which mites are both a powerful ally and an insidious foe, I've come to learn so much more about them.
In hindsight, not only was my reaction to the presence of some of these pests a bit extreme, but in other cases I was destroying good mites that were actually effective in helping control and eliminate the bad guys.
This post is something I put together as an introduction to discuss mites in a bit more depth. My focus in the following posts will be concerning terrariums, herptoculture, and the mite species that readers are most likely to encounter in relation to those environments. At first I wanted just make this a single blog post. The more I worked on it, the more I realize that the scope of this topic is far too large to do it justice in just one go. To do a deep dive would probably take a book to sufficiently cover everything, but for our purposes I'll be dividing this topic into three sections for the month:
PART 1 - THE GOOD
In this point I will go over some of the mites which are on our side: their biology, uses, and application.
PART 2 - THE BAD
This post will be discussing commonly encountered pest species in the terrarium and in rearing insects/invertebrates. I will look at methods of control from an Integrated Pest Management perspective.
PART 3 - THE BENIGN
This final post will be looking at Oribatid mites, also called moss mites, and will discuss their impact on the terrarium environment, their biology, and other related matters.
It is my hope that if I can help others learn from my mistakes in dealing with mites that perhaps I can save a least a few some time and effort in managing these critters in their own collections. To paraphrase Thomas Eisner - mites not going anywhere, so the sooner we make peace with the landlord, the better.
Thanks for reading.
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