Demo the Mite

G'day,

I’m Demo, that’s short for Demodex follicularum mite. I am an incy wincey, teeny weenie microscopic mite and I live on your face! I have eight legs and look a bit like a mix between a short-legged spider and a worm. Pretty good looking I recon.

Here’s a tip to help you read my story. It’s been shown through our mite DNA, that we can have differences due to the origin of our humans. Given that my human is Australian, you may want to use Aussie slang while you’re reading my story.

My relatives and I make our homes in your pores and hair follicles. Don’t stress. As far as human scientists can tell, we don’t hurt or damage most humans. Though we may have something to do with a skin condition that some humans get, called Rosacea. Humans who have Rosacea have more of us on their skin then humans who don’t have the condition. There are usually more of us on humans who have immune deficiencies as well. I’m sorry if you’ve got one of those conditions, they don’t sound real good.

I have some cousin mites that also live on you. They live a bit deeper in your skin, yep yuck! I’m just going to talk about ME and my relatives, because mate, we are bloody awesome. You can have up to one thousand or so of us living on your face and other places. You cannot hear us or even feel us, we are somewhat invisible to you. Sometimes I wish I could yarn with you, I recon we’d get along great.

Do you want to know something real cool? I never ever leave your face for the whole of my life. Which is roughly fourteen human days, then we die in a wonderful poop explosion, yes, on your face. Well sort of like that. To start with we don’t have dunnies, you know, toilets to poop in, but that’s not the problem. For the whole of our lives, we don’t poop because we simply cannot. We don’t have butts. You know, Anus, Bugu, Rectum, Haha’s, we don’t have one. Yep, NOT cool. That’s possibly why we don’t do a great deal, just eat, swim in oil, sleep, procreate and die.

Talking about procreation, our birds and the bees’ story goes a bit like this. At night, every now and then, males and females come out of their pore homes, find mates and copulate on your face. You’ll be happy to know we are very tame when it comes to copulation. No crazy hanky panky stuff for us. Just straight up copulation. Unlike some other mites I’ve heard about. Wow, they are out there, sexual cannibalism, incest, matricide, and fratricide. Crazy hey. Anyway, after copulation, the females lay a couple of huge, microscopic eggs. I say huge, because relative to us mites, our eggs are about one third to a half of an adult female’s body size. Bugger that! All females lay their eggs around the rim of the pore they live in. Once hatched babies head of and find their own pore homes. Eventually they get old enough to do the copulation tango as well. This is how our world goes around. Very exciting!

When you humans are born you collect your own hand-me-down face mites from your mum. Basically, us mites come about from our mite ancestors who lived on your ancestors faces. We mites go back generations and generations of living on your ancestors. Basically, right throughout your whole human evolution. Hmm, that’s an interesting point which I may have to talk to a lawyer about. Who owns our homes? Okay back to the birds and the bees. As you humans grow up, you also collect other random mites from other people you are close to. A great help to our gene pool, thank you.

Another interesting thing about you humans and us mites is, some very clever scientists looked at our mite DNA, not only were they able to tell that humans from different lineage have mites of certain lineage. But also those scientists use our DNA to help see the different lineage of humans who colonised different places on earth and also, what hanky panky they got up to in their lifetimes. How bloody cool are we! Oh, you are very welcome!

Isn’t it bloody fantastic that you humans have us? Your very own private mite ecosystem living on your face! Hope you have a great day and thank you for being our host body, oops, humans.

Oh, PS. Always remember, you are never ever alone!

PPS. Does anyone have the number for a good lawyer?

Cheers Demo.

Reference:

http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150508-these-mites-live-on-your-face