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Has anyone come across any?
I ask because I have been breeding my own crickets, and yesterday I opened up one of the tubs of hatchlings to feed some baby spiders, only to find that what was once a seething tubful of crickets had only a few left. Those few had mites on them. Their heads and some other areas near the fronts of their bodies were entirely covered by mites, and no skin was visible in those areas at all. Needless to say, I threw them out, along with another tub where I found some crickets had got mites on their heads, too. The other tubs were fine. Maybe they were ordinary scavenging mites which just happened to like to sit on the crickets' heads, but that seemed unlikely, since there wasn't a mite infestation anywhere else except on the heads of the crickets.
I haven't got any wild caught insects or spiders, so I don't know where they'd have come from, if they are parasitic.
Of course they are so small (the crickets and the mites!) that they may have been there before and I didn't see them, and they may have been there when I fed them to some spiderlings previously, so I hope I haven't already transferred them to some new hosts...
So has anyone come across this before? Do I need to worry, apart from just keeping things clean?
I ask because I have been breeding my own crickets, and yesterday I opened up one of the tubs of hatchlings to feed some baby spiders, only to find that what was once a seething tubful of crickets had only a few left. Those few had mites on them. Their heads and some other areas near the fronts of their bodies were entirely covered by mites, and no skin was visible in those areas at all. Needless to say, I threw them out, along with another tub where I found some crickets had got mites on their heads, too. The other tubs were fine. Maybe they were ordinary scavenging mites which just happened to like to sit on the crickets' heads, but that seemed unlikely, since there wasn't a mite infestation anywhere else except on the heads of the crickets.
I haven't got any wild caught insects or spiders, so I don't know where they'd have come from, if they are parasitic.
Of course they are so small (the crickets and the mites!) that they may have been there before and I didn't see them, and they may have been there when I fed them to some spiderlings previously, so I hope I haven't already transferred them to some new hosts...
So has anyone come across this before? Do I need to worry, apart from just keeping things clean?