ROBB DUNN, BIOLOGIST & WRITER, NORTH CAROLINA STATE UNIVERSITY:
In general on our skin we have thousands of species.  And so we’ve studied a lot about the bacteria that live on our skin, fungi live on our skin, worms live on your skin.  We all have those things. 

Mites are going into hair follicles and into the pores.  There could be hundreds of thousands, or even millions in an individual person.  We don’t really know.  We know that sometimes they appear to come out and mate on your skin.

The mites have sex on your head, right?  So that’s happening .  It’s probably happening right now, you know, with you, uh, with everybody who’s watching.  And so they do have this funny way of living on you that I think we find totally gross if we talk about it, you know.  And yet independent of our comfort with these realities, these mites do tons of different things.

And so figuring that story out I think will show us a ton, not just about them, but about mammals.  And it’s just wide open.  And for the most part for now we could just sample people and figure out what they have.

 
MEAGAN THOEMMES, GRADUATE STUDENT,    NORTH  CAROLINA STATE UNIVERSITY:
“Your Wildlife” is a citizen-science outreach initiative.  And so the “Meet Your Mites” project is an extension of “Your Wildlife.”  The project is really unique in the fact that we get to engage the participants personally.  So they get to learn about their mites, what’s living directly on them at the time of the sampling.  And then we get to learn about the things that are so closely tied to our bodies that we know very little about.

Face mites are these tiny arthropods.  They’re microscopic and they actually live all around your body.  They seem to be really concentrated on your face.  And they were originally collected from foreheads so they got coined that even though they could live in a lot of other areas.

 
DAN FERGUS, MICROBIOLOGIST, NORTH CAROLINA STATE UNIVERSITY:
The life cycle of the mites is about 14 days.  And it’s thought that the females, once they choose a pore, more or less stay in that pore.   And the males roam around a little bit.

So they live about five days as adults, going around mating on your face at night.  They idea is the female comes to the surface of the pore, a male is searching around for a mate, finds her, they mate at the opening of the pore.  The female goes back down in and will live the rest of her life down there laying eggs  and eating your sebum.  And the male will go off and find another pore, maybe another mate or another place to just hang out.

They don’t have an anus so they’re not really pooping.  The idea has been put out there that they may explode.  We’ve looked at a lot of mites and we’ve never seen an engorged mite about to explode.

 
ROBB DUNN, BIOLOGIST & WRITER, NORTH CAROLINA STATE UNIVERSITY:
It’s a bad way to go but you gotta go some way.

By looking at those mites we can figure out stories about ourselves and that would be a really neat thing because they evolve super rapidly. 

 

MEAGAN THOEMMES, GRADUATE STUDENT,    NORTH CAROLINA STATE UNIVERSITY:
So one of the main goals of this study is that we are trying to get a lot of mites from different populations of people around the world because we are really interested in mapping the genetic history of these mites.

So we can use the relationships that we find in these mites populations  to determine  not only how they are related to each other but we could use that to determine how we’re related to each other and how we spread around the world and how human moved through time. 

It’s very exciting to know there’s a tiny arthropod that’s associated with every person on the planet.