Rob Dunn, assistant professor and director of Your Wildlife Project and biological sciences, along with other researchers, started the “Meet Your Mites” project this year aimed at sampling mites in order to better understand the evolution of the tiny arthropods.

It sounds like something that came straight out of a horror movie – tiny Demodex mites, naked to the human eye, crawling all over your face at night. 

Hundreds of these mites can inhabit a single hair follicle. Dunn said he wants to learn more about these mites in the near future.

“These microscopic parasites (too small to feel or be seen with the naked eye!) spend their days hiding in our hair follicles, sucking on sebum (the oily secretions produced by the sebaceous glands) and eating the cells lining the hair follicles. At night, under the cover of darkness, adult mites emerge, crawl around, and … mate on your face,” according to the project website.

Project Research Assistant Megan Thoemmes said they hypothesized that the mites would be more diverse than previously thought, especially between the mites found on different people from around the world. Past research examined mites on cadavers, but scientists only discovered two species of mites present on the human face, according to Dunn.

“The first day that I found one,hearing that they crawl on your face, I did not sleep for four nights,” Thoemmes said.

Previous research also failed to determine whether the mites were beneficial or harmful, though there appears to be a correlation between mites and patients diagnosed with rosacea, according to New Scientist magazine.

 In dogs, large “population explosions” of mites cause mange in dogs, Thoemmes said. and one of the species of Demodex mites closely resembles the dog mite in terms of genetics.

“Everybody has them, but we don’t know what role they play. To think that they probably live on everyone’s face, and we don’t even know is pretty amazing,” Thoemmes said.

The mites could also help illustrate how humans evolved, according to Dunn.  For example, researchers were able to reconstruct the evolution of humans after examining the lineages of head lice, Dunn said.

“So what we can do is figure out how different are the mites on different people from around the world, and do we actually see different species of mites that look the same, but are actually very very different,” Dunn said. “In your lifetime, the mites may have reproduced 400 to 500 times, and so in terms of human generations…that gets you 5,000 years.”

One of the previous problems in studying mites was the lack of technology available to get a decent look at the little creatures, according to Dunn. While current technology has enhanced the observation of mites, there still remains the problem of keeping the mites alive, according to Thoemmes.

“Mites don’t last more than 24 hours in oil on the slides,” Thoemmes said.

This spurred the molecular work of Dan Fergus, another of the project’s collaborators who is researching new techniques for studying the mites, according to Thoemmes.

The team’s strategy included holding local sampling events, where they used a spatula to scrape mites from the sides of volunteers’ noses and surrounding cheek area, Thoemmes said.

“It seems kind of ridiculous, but people seem okay with it.”

Though the team welcomes all students who are interested in becoming subjects in the study, Theommes said they do need more international students to sign up at their sampling events to see how mites vary across the globe.

Three-hundred-and-eight people attended 10 etvents organized by the project this year. The team collected more than 60 mites from more than 39 participants.