The Arachnids That Live on Your Face

http://news.ncsu.edu/2014/08/face-mites-2014/

by peeko • 12 years ago

160 32 12 years ago

news.ncsu.edu

dang• 12 years ago

Url changed from http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2014/08/27/3-things-d..., which points to this.

devindotcom• 12 years ago

Yeah, it's always better not to look too close. Just wait til you find out what lives in your mouth!

Reminds me of this piece detailing the writer's own "microbiome":

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/loom/2011/06/27/discoverin...

ekianjo• 12 years ago

If I remember correctly, our guts have more bacteria surface exposure than our own cells. The interactions betwen what we eat , these bacteria, and our own genome is a big black box at this stage.

vacri• 12 years ago

On the contrary, it's better to look close. Death to the public squeamishness about human biology, I say! Know and understand how your body travels through life, don't fear it and put it out of your mind :)

stakecounter• 12 years ago

I woke up with swollen eyelids one morning a few years back and was diagnosed with blepharitis later that day. I now use Sterilid 1-2 times a day since it contains tea tree oil which supposedly is effective in treatment against Demodex. I occasionally still get flareups/complications but they've definitely seemed rarer since using the product:

http://www.theratears.com/sterilid.php

delinka• 12 years ago

I'll be rubbing my face for the next three days with imaginary itches from bugs that live on my face.

lotsofmangos• 12 years ago

I've been trying to come up with a plan of how to teach them how to tapdance.

So, if you see someone out busking with a lab microscope and a boombox, shouting something about face spiders, then chuck us a quid. I promise to remember it when me and the crew are rich and famous.

Houshalter2• 12 years ago

You could probably kill them with rubbing alcohol on your skin.

octagonal• 12 years ago

I really hope this article doesn't make anyone actually try to get rid of these arachnids although I'm sure "hygiene" companies will be all over this in a few years.

Spiders are living on your FACE! Please buy our stuff.

ivanca2• 12 years ago

Nope. Mittens are animals not bacteria and they are very tought, here are some still alive after 30 minutes in alcohol. http://youtu.be/EUa6jZeUUOY

seszett• 12 years ago

It would work at most until the next time you come in contact with a human or another mammal, which is probably not very far away. I guess even just shaking hands would be enough, since people often touch their face with their hands. The individual mites communities on each mammal are probably not very isolated but come often in contact with mites from other animals.

jackpirate• 12 years ago

I wish the article would have addressed how babies get these mites from their parents. Are they present in the womb? Or do they get transferred from all the hugs and kisses?

JshWright• 12 years ago

There's no way they are in the womb (they wouldn't be able to get inside the uterus, and the immune system would attack them quite quickly if they did).

They are almost certainly transfered via close skin contact (breastfeeding, etc).

pmalynin2• 12 years ago

"There's no way they are in the womb (they wouldn't be able to get inside the uterus, and the immune system would attack them quite quickly if they did)." That is simply untrue [1,2,3,4, 5]. It has been recently discovered that many fetuses acquire their gut bacteria before parturition, it is logical to assume that the same can happened with these mites.

[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3747743 [2] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22647043 [3] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18281199 [4] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19018955 [5] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18166321

smcl• 12 years ago

If it is the former then this is a beautiful example of something being a hilariously unfathomable idea* in the not too distant past ... and then turning out to be sort of true. I like these :)

* = The JD\Dr Cox "shaved the baby" scene in Scrubs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHAAmdskBqU

igonvalue• 12 years ago

According to another article[0],

Thoemmes also sampled ten 18-year-olds and found Demodex DNA on just 70 percent of them. This fits with what earlier studies had shown—the mites seem to become more common with age. They’re rare on babies, more common on teenagers, and universal in adults. No one really knows where we get them from. Dogs get their face-mites during nursing, and humans might do the same—after all, one study found a lot of Demodex living in nipple tissue. But the fact that some teens aren’t colonised suggests that we pick up these creatures throughout our lives.

[0] http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2014/08/27/you-almos...

Codhisattva• 12 years ago

"There ain't no bugs on me. There ain't no bugs on me. There may be bugs on some of you mugs but there ain't no bugs on me."

This old nursery rhythm can join Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and the other lies we tell our children.

quackerhacker• 12 years ago

I wonder if I'm the only one who gets annoyed by how many suggestions of evolutionary theory there are in the article.

we acquired our mites from our ape ancestors...

as early humans walked out of Africa...

I believe in evolution...but I believe in misinterpretation a lot more.

robin_reala• 12 years ago

What is it you believe was misinterpreted? That mites were passed over rather than staying through the process of evolution?

jessaustin• 12 years ago

TFA annoyed me much less than those hand-wavy evo-psych essays do. Actually the evolutionary stuff made sense, if one assumes that mites inhabiting different animal species are themselves different species, which do not or cannot interbreed. Maybe other research has indicated that?

bglazer• 12 years ago

Dan Fergus ... discovered that mite DNA could be sequenced from face scrapings regardless of whether a mite could be found under the microscope

Reminds me of the use of DNA sequencing to detect giant salamanders using DNA collected from stream water. [0]

There's something so incredible wondrous to me about this. Tiny, tiny signals revealing secret hidden life.

[0] http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna...

chrisweekly• 12 years ago

Remember, each of us is an ecosystem in which purely "human" cells are vastly outnumbered. We should get comfortable with that idea.

The Arachnids That Live on Your Face

Related Stories