# Deliberately culturing mites



## npaull (May 8, 2005)

Just curious if anyone has messed around with deliberately culturing mites. So often we complain about them contaminating cultures but virtually every species of dendrobatid loves to eat mites in the wild, at least at some point in their life cycle.

Are there any mites than can be cultured simply?


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## frogparty (Dec 27, 2007)

i culture them. Super easy to culture on coco coir. They eat vegetable scraps, and springtail food. Im local, I could give you a chunk of coir + mites if yuo wanted to set up a mite culture


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## ChrisK (Oct 28, 2008)

They seem more than effortless to culture (just culture something else and you'll wind up with plenty of them) the hard part to me would be feeding them out without just dumping the culture medium into the frog tanks.


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## james67 (Jun 28, 2008)

tree fern fiber pieces work well for transferring insects of this small size from culture medium to tank.

james


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## Ed (Sep 19, 2004)

Just set up another shelf with appropriate protection to keep the mites out of the younger fly cultures and keep the older cultures around for a few more weeks. They should start producing a lot of mites.. now you can feed them out.. personally I wouldn't bother due to potential allergy issues...


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## frogparty (Dec 27, 2007)

I usually just put a piece of cucumber or zucchini in the culture, leave it overnight, and then put the piece of veggie covered in mites into the viv.


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## Woodsman (Jan 3, 2008)

As a frogger who has developed horrendous allergies to mites from my cultures, I think it is not worth the health risks to want to culture mites for food.

Just my opinion, Richard.


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## npaull (May 8, 2005)

I guess I don't mean culturing the mites that populate/parasitize fruit fly cultures. There must be literally thousands of species of mites. Presumably, some are both easy to culture, non parasitic, and relatively hypoallergenic.


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## sports_doc (Nov 15, 2004)

^ IME Richard the culpret there has/might be excelsior. 

* and I don't deliberately cx mites, mainly b/c I seem to do just a fine job cx them unintentionally


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## jsh21 (Jan 24, 2007)

Aside from the mites that infest fruit fly cultures the mites found in woodlice/springtail cultures may be suitable for culturing (there are a couple of active threads on the topic). They are easy to grow and stay small, roughly half the size of my springtails. I am not aware of any reason why young thumbnails species that typically require springtails and stunted fruit flies would not relish them. From my personal observations they appear to be a different species from those found in fruit fly cultures. I do not know if that makes a difference to allergy suffers or not. Lastly I have read in past threads that if you put fruit fly mites into your tanks and your fresh cultures are nearby they can infest them.


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## Ed (Sep 19, 2004)

npaull said:


> I guess I don't mean culturing the mites that populate/parasitize fruit fly cultures. There must be literally thousands of species of mites. Presumably, some are both easy to culture, non parasitic, and relatively hypoallergenic.


 
I don't think that there is a hypoallergenic mite.. there is a lot of cross reactivity between the allergenic components in many invertebrates and shellfish and those of mites.. See for example 

ScienceDirect - Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology : Cross antigenic and allergenic properties of the house dust mite Dermatophagoides farinae and the storage mite Tyrophagus putrescentiae*1

Allergen cross-reactivity between house-dust mites and other invertebrates - Sidenius - 2001 - Allergy - Wiley Online Library

Asthma after consumption of snails in house-dust-mite-allergic patients: a case of IgE cross-reactivity - Ree - 2007 - Allergy - Wiley Online Library

Role of tropomyosin as a cross-reacting allergen in sensitization to cockroach in patients from martinique (French Caribbean Island) with a respiratory allergy to mite and a food allergy to crab and shrimp


If you want to skip culturing the mites yourself, you could always order the predacious mites they use for control of spider mites. Otherwise you may want to look at detrivore mites (and if introduced to an enclosure detrivores tend to establish themselves as part of the microfauna.). These would probably be more prevalent in many enclosures except for all of the sterilization that many people do in an attempt to avoid unwanted pest species. I have detrivore mites in a couple of tanks. 

Ed


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## tim13 (Feb 1, 2011)

Ed, any chance I can get you to sell me a starter culture of detrivore mites to seed my tanks with?


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## Reef_Haven (Jan 19, 2011)

Is there no worry that they will crawl out of the viv and get literally everywhere?
I have a Black Soldier Fly colony. I've been trying to reduce the mites in. I was at a point where I would have 1/4" of mites stacked up on any food I put in for the worms.


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## Ed (Sep 19, 2004)

tim13 said:


> Ed, any chance I can get you to sell me a starter culture of detrivore mites to seed my tanks with?


 
They are in established frog tanks.... 

Ed


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## gary1218 (Dec 31, 2005)

Is there any additional nutritional value to mites over the other "bugs" we're culturing for the frogs now? Or are they pretty much just "another" food source?


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## Ed (Sep 19, 2004)

gary1218 said:


> Is there any additional nutritional value to mites over the other "bugs" we're culturing for the frogs now? Or are they pretty much just "another" food source?


 
I don't think any of the mites have been analyzed for thier nutritional composition. 

Ed


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## GRIMM (Jan 18, 2010)

I would try and avoid mites at all costs!!! I have them, and I'm allergic as F$%&!!! They get everywhere, especially if your house is above 50% humidity. Im gonna have to get rid of all my cultures, get mite paper, start from scratch, reduce my house humidity to kill them off, and vacuum everything multiple times. I dont care how much they benefit the frogs. If my own health suffers from them, the frogs will have to cope without.


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## Ed (Sep 19, 2004)

The thing that amazes me is how allergies to mites can translate over to allergies to shellfish or other invertebrates.. 


Ed


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## D3monic (Feb 8, 2010)

Not sure if I am allergic to mites but they definitely itch if I get them on my hands. 

I did have some larger detrivore mites in my iso culture for a while. Eventually they died out unfortunately. They where a large brown mite roughly the size of a spring but roundish.


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## frogmanchu (Feb 18, 2011)

Mag leaves work great for mite transfer if you put the food source on the leaf. Or just take mushrooms and transfer the shroom from culture to tank. It keeps them in one spot for the frogs and you dont take substrate with you. I've done this alot lmao.


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## frogmanchu (Feb 18, 2011)

D3monic said:


> Not sure if I am allergic to mites but they definitely itch if I get them on my hands.
> 
> I did have some larger detrivore mites in my iso culture for a while. Eventually they died out unfortunately. They where a large brown mite roughly the size of a spring but roundish.


I had those too.


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## GRIMM (Jan 18, 2010)

Ed said:


> The thing that amazes me is how allergies to mites can translate over to allergies to shellfish or other invertebrates..
> 
> 
> Ed


Hahaha Im allergic to shellfish!!! Hives to the MAX!


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## ubstrong (Jan 2, 2010)

It's hard to see the mites, but I've found they generaly don't move fast enough to trigger the frogs to hunt them.


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## earthfrog (May 18, 2008)

The mites amass in the tanks if you feed often and heavily, I don't think there is really a shortage of mites for the frogs in an established tank so that you would need to supplement with mites.


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## frogparty (Dec 27, 2007)

I feed them to thumbnail froglets primarily, and as an occasional snack for the adults


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## frogface (Feb 20, 2010)

I found 2 new El Dorado froglets in my tank today. Scraped off a bunch of mites from an infested culture and dumped them in the pumilio tank. The whole family descended on the mites and had a feast. 

Think I'll keep feeding out the mites as long as I've got em. I don't think culturing them is a problem. My problem is how to 'not' culture them, lol.


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## JimO (May 14, 2010)

I have lost several spring cultures to mites and I've noted two different types. One I assume is a detritivore species because they resembled bloated tick and congregated on the mushrooms I was feeding the springs (before I took Ed's advice and switched to baker's yeast only). The other type of might looked somewhat like a springtail with a visible proboscis and they were very fast. I feared those to be predatory mites. Either way, the springs disappeared and I dropped each container in the freezer for a week. This photo I pulled off the internet resembles the first type I spoke of and I did feed these out. They were very popular with the pum froglets.









I am very allergic to dust mites, but have never had a reaction to those in my spring cultures.


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## Reef_Haven (Jan 19, 2011)

I'm giving this a try, even though I'm a bit skeptical. Seeding one of my tanks with a few thousand mites, "On purpose".


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## james67 (Jun 28, 2008)

how did you separate those out?

james


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## Reef_Haven (Jan 19, 2011)

They infested my soldier fly colony, which is basically just a compost container. They pile up to 1/4 inch thick on top of any food I throw in there, usually fruit and vegetable scraps. This happened to be a pancake. I just tapped them off into a cup.


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## hypostatic (Apr 25, 2011)

I've noticed ever since I was a kid in the northeast US that whenever summer would approach I'd start to see these little red dots on sidewalks/streets/everywhere. When looked under a magnifying glass I discovered that they were really mites! I think they're the red spider mite. So you might have a nice supply of mites in your driveway.

As a side note I have no idea if they would be for culturing or not. They're red, so they might not be very appetizing. Also, another possible problem is that is they are what I think they are, they feed on plants, so they might cause damage to your terrarium plants.

Anyway those are my two cents.


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## Ed (Sep 19, 2004)

Those are red velvet mites see Red Velvet Mite - Trombidium sp.


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## hypostatic (Apr 25, 2011)

> As larvae, they attach themselves to a variety of arthropods and feed parasitically. They will suck blood from a gnat or grasshopper, for instance, sometimes hitching a ride with several other mites. When red velvet mites become nymphs and then adults, they take to the soil to devour much smaller prey, including other mites and their eggs, the eggs of insects and snails, and primitive wingless insects.


Well then, scratch that. Seems like they would be horrible for the purposes of culturing then haha


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## tim13 (Feb 1, 2011)

I don't know if im allergic to mites, but everytime I feed out my fly cultures my face gets itchy for about an hour. I assumed it was mites crawling on me, which docent bother me much.


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## Ed (Sep 19, 2004)

tim13 said:


> I don't know if im allergic to mites, but everytime I feed out my fly cultures my face gets itchy for about an hour. I assumed it was mites crawling on me, which docent bother me much.


 
You can also be allergic to the flies. There is documentation in the literature that shows that people that routinely work with the flies become allergic to them. 

You may want to start wearing a good respirator.. If it gets worse, you may want to talk to your doctor about keeping an epi-pen around. 

Ed


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## Reef_Haven (Jan 19, 2011)

Reef_Haven said:


> I'm giving this a try, even though I'm a bit skeptical. Seeding one of my tanks with a few thousand mites, "On purpose".


Update.

They all disappeared within a week or so. These were in my Cristobal Viv. The frogs seemed happy to have them. Never found any infestation outside of the viv. My fly cultures are about 15 feet away, no unusual amounts of mites at 4 weeks, when they get disposed.


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## Markw (Jun 27, 2011)

Are you positive they've disappeared and aren't living in the substrate?

Mark


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## Ed (Sep 19, 2004)

If they are grain mites, they will starve unless provided with food. 

Ed


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## esnailme (Jun 17, 2013)

frogparty said:


> I usually just put a piece of cucumber or zucchini in the culture, leave it overnight, and then put the piece of veggie covered in mites into the viv.


_I know this is an old thread_ but do you have problems with the mites escaping out of the viv?


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## Ed (Sep 19, 2004)

esnailme said:


> _I know this is an old thread_ but do you have problems with the mites escaping out of the viv?



I'm not sure why your concerned about this given that your constantly exposed to mites including your skin (depending on the age bracket as much as 2/3 of the population have mites living on them), the rest of the house (dust mites) and even many food products (such as grain mites). 

Some comments 

Ed


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## hypostatic (Apr 25, 2011)

Your body is a wonderfully disgusting ecosystem home to hundreds of different species


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