There are two mites principally involved in human demodex infestations, Demodex folliculorum and Demodex brevis. D folliculorum is found in small hair follicles, particularly the eyelashes. In both its immature and adult stages it feeds on skin cells. D brevis is found in the oil glands that are connected to small hair follicles and feeds on the gland cells.
D folliculorum mites are 0.3-0.4mm in length and D. brevis 0.15-0.2mm. This makes them invisible to the naked eye but under the microscope their structure is clearly visible. The 8 legs of this mite move at a rate of 8-16 mm/h and this is mainly done during the night as bright light causes the mite to recede back into the follicle.
Ever since I learned about them as a kid I’ve hated them. Commensuralism my ass.
I’m happy when I lay waste to them. I can almost hear the drum-playing woman singing “Leo has slain his thousands…”
So get this. Do you know why your poop stinks? Your large intestine and colon and crammed full of very active bacteria. They are digesting whatever you didn’t eat. In fact, they replicate so fast that most of the weight and volume of your poop is bacteria. Most of the gas is stuff they make.
And I don’t think you wanna kill them anyway. Follicular mites are ignored by your body, but dead, decomposing mites would, I assume, cause problems, maybe folliculitis.
Depends on how old you are. From the wiki article:
It also indicates that commensalism isn’t the issue any more:
Pictures of those things have floated around as prototypical “ugly critter” pictures in various contexts for years. I remember one pinned on a company bulletin board labelled “Typical <our product> software bug”.
Interesting factoid. They don’t poop. No anus. Now you might think that’s a good thing, but what it means is that they store up their entire lifetime supply of crap in their bodies, and the entire load is released when they die.