The Arachnids That Live on Your Face | Hacker News Reader

The Arachnids That Live on Your Face

news.ncsu.edu

160 pointspeeko32 comments

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?

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).

"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

> it is logical to assume that the same can happened with these mites

Bacteria are about 1/100 the size (1/1,000,000 the volume) of these mites. The mites can be seen by the naked eye (barely).

How would the mite even get in? Much less breathe. Bacteria can get in the same way sperm do, mites are not able to swim through the fluid.

Frankly my point was more about the immune system.

I didn't downmod you, I thought the point about bacteria was good.

But you went rather too far in assuming what's true for bacteria is true for mites.

Plus the immune system actively works with bacteria to cultivate specific species. So you should not extrapolate to all bacteria either.

By your reasoning, I guess it would only be logical to assume that elephants can get in there too.

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

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...

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...

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.

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 :)

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

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

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.

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

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.

Yup, and then once they are dead something 100x worse fills the niche and people start getting mange or something...

Already happening in Easter Europe and China. Go to the doctor and they show you under the microscope -- look you got spiders on your face. Buy this cream we made in the basement over at my cousins' it will help you.

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

Mites. Not mittens.

Mittens are animals too! :-) https://www.google.com/search?q=mittens+animal&tbm=isch

That's interesting. I know that eyelash mites and insects are quickly killed by alcohol though. Perhaps they used a different type or concentration? I know it can't be pure alcohol won't work for example, it needs some water to absorb into the cell.

The guy has more similar videos using bleach, ammonia and other substances and the mites survives them all.

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.

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

> 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...

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

"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.

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.

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

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?

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