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Related: About this forumTiny Mites Living on Your Face Hold the Key to Your Ancestry
http://www.takepart.com/article/2015/12/14/tiny-mites-live-your-skin-hold-key-your-ancestryWhen people talk about wildlife, theyre generally thinking about wolves running through forests, or maybe squirrels skittering about neighborhood trees. But lets look a bit closer to home: Blink. Wildlife just took a ride on your eyelashes. If that makes you lift your eyebrows in puzzlement (or dismay), well, there are animals in your eyebrows, too.
In fact, your face is an ecosystem of long standing for two species, which have been passed on for generations in your family. They probably climbed aboard while you were nursing at your mothers breast. Demodex folliculorum has evolved to live in human hair follicles. Its cousin Demodex brevis ensconces itself slightly deeper in the microhabitat of your sebaceous glands.
Follicle mites, as they are commonly known, are distant relatives of spiders. They eat our dead skin cells, or maybe the oils, bacteria, and fungi on our skin, and they are, I should quickly add, utterly harmless. Its even possible they perform some sort of housekeeping service, making us mutually beneficial: We give them habitat, they minimize zits. But no one really knows for sure. In any case, mites have coevolved with humans and prehumans for millions of years.
A study released Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that mites may also provide a sort of skin-deep view of our genealogy and shed new light on the history of human migration. Bowdoin College evolutionary biologist Michael Palopoli and his coauthors sampled follicle mites from 70 individuals, using the standard technology in the field: They scraped a bobby pin across the forehead of their test subjects. Then they analyzed the scruffy material trapped in the crook of the bobby pin.
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Tiny Mites Living on Your Face Hold the Key to Your Ancestry (Original Post)
eridani
Dec 2015
OP
You don't even want to think about what's living in your intestines. n/t
Fortinbras Armstrong
Dec 2015
#4
byronius
(7,398 posts)1. I'd read somewhere that they might be responsible for rosacea.
Perhaps an overpopulation -- the suggestion was that the skin develops an allergy to the mite's waste products.
Baitball Blogger
(46,753 posts)2. Etomological forensic anthropology.
That's what it should be called.
Orsino
(37,428 posts)3. Talk about burying the lead!
We've got fucking SPIDERS IN OUR EYES.
Fortinbras Armstrong
(4,473 posts)4. You don't even want to think about what's living in your intestines. n/t
eridani
(51,907 posts)5. We are just huge hotels for billions of microscopic critters n/t
Thor_MN
(11,843 posts)6. Brings a whole new twist on "Tiny tots with their eyes all aglow"
I knew this, but I might find it hard to sleep tonight.
Judi Lynn
(160,598 posts)7. So creepy! Had no idea. Completely depersonalizing!
When you shuffle off this mortal coil, will you have space mites on your ethereal body?
Why don't they mind their own bidness?
jakeXT
(10,575 posts)9. So washing yourself is like performing an apocalypse for your mites ? /nt