Music:

Camiidae webpage: https://camiidae.carrd.co/

-Frost Waltz – Kevin MacLeod (license 4.0 de Creative Commons. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
http://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/index.html?isrc=USUAN1100516

-Weevil: Music for bugs – Camiidae:
https://youtu.be/PuVkc6xwtE0?si=CVqkFOk5pRtEXqP3

-Scarab Beetle: Music for bugs – Camiidae:
https://youtu.be/RHMdsATmNQA?si=NAS6DcwgxZP4MlYE

-Hey there – Half cool:
https://youtu.be/1g4pj5zostU?si=ZU8pUh0mZPMU7bt-

-Losing your marbels – The Soundlings:
https://youtu.be/phfCOVz-tXo?si=sySI5alBbqkJHdZV

-Bumblebee: Music for bugs – Camiidae:
https://youtu.be/V5oaKRZ_bCc?si=EwTFmHejhtTJG8Tb

-Gemstone frog: music for critters – Camiidae:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GeAHx7oVmMI

-Ophabinia: Music for Cambrian animals – Camiidae:
https://youtu.be/fP8pSGuvBmM?si=CkpsUnujTJo8pUEK

Sound Effects:

-Crowd in a bar (LCR).wav by Leandros.Ntounis -- https://freesound.org/s/163995/ -- License: Attribution 3.0

-Film_01.aif by bobv2 -- https://freesound.org/s/400862/ -- License: Creative Commons 0

References:

“BBC NEWS | UK | Magazine | Cheese Mites and Other Wonders.” n.d. Accessed September 22, 2023. http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7423847.stm.

Biani, Natalia B., Ulrich G. Mueller, and William T. Wcislo. 2009. “Cleaner Mites: Sanitary Mutualism in the Miniature Ecosystem of Neotropical Bee Nests.” The American Naturalist 173 (6): 841–47. https://doi.org/10.1086/598497.

Capinera, John L. 2008. Encyclopedia of Entomology. Springer Science & Business Media.

Dabert, Miroslawa, Wojciech Witalinski, Andrzej Kazmierski, Ziemowit Olszanowski, and Jacek Dabert. 2010. “Molecular Phylogeny of Acariform Mites (Acari, Arachnida): Strong Conflict between Phylogenetic Signal and Long-Branch Attraction Artifacts.” Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution 56 (1): 222–41. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ympev.2009.12.020.

Dhooria, Manjit Singh. 2016. Fundamentals of Applied Acarology. Springer.

Heethoff, Michael, and Lars Koerner. 2007. “Small but Powerful: The Oribatid Mite Archegozetes LongisetosusAoki (Acari, Oribatida) Produces Disproportionately High Forces.” Journal of Experimental Biology 210 (17): 3036–42. https://doi.org/10.1242/jeb.008276.

Marren, Peter. 2010. Bugs Britannica. London: Chatto & Windus.

Martin, Peter. 2008. “Wassermilben (Hydrachnidia, Acari) und Insekten: Ein Überblick über eine selten betrachtete Beziehung.”

OConnor, Barry M. 2009. “Chapter 169 - Mites.” In Encyclopedia of Insects (Second Edition), edited by Vincent H. Resh and Ring T. Cardé, 643–49. San Diego: Academic Press. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-374144-8.00178-8.

Rubin, Samuel, Maria Ho-Yan Young, Jonathan C. Wright, Dwight L. Whitaker, and Anna N. Ahn. 2016. “Exceptional Running and Turning Performance in a Mite.” Journal of Experimental Biology 219 (5): 676–85. https://doi.org/10.1242/jeb.128652.

Script:

London, 1903, *sound of crowd* a crowd of curious people have gathered at the Alhambra Music Hall. They came to witness the wonders of one very recent invention, the cinematography *sound of cinematograph*. Films were a great novelty, it was pretty easy to impress the audience with almost anything, but this time was a little bit special.

The film began displaying a typical English man having some breakfast while reading the newspaper with the help of a magnifying glass. Then… by a happy accident, he aims the glass to the cheese of his breakfast, just to discover, with certain shock, the beings that there inhabit. The screen then passes to show what the man is supposed to be seeing: Huge crab-like creatures, cover in long bristles, crawling with their 8 legs between cheese boulders.

This footage was short, no more than 40 seconds depicting these micro animals. But that was enough to create a huge impact into that audience. Even increasing the sales of cheap microscopes in those days, which usually include packets of these creatures, cheese mites, as a test sample.

Scientist were used to see these common animals through microscopes since at least 200 years ago, but that was not the case for the general public. This was the official debut of the microcosmos into society. The protagonist of the first science documentary ever produced in history was… the mite.

-musical intro

Greetings my friend and welcome to “it’s not a monster” on defense of the misunderstood, the despised, the vilified or just… the ugly ones. I am David Andres Quinche.

 In this podcast we are going to be talking about undesirable animals, non gratae creatures which, sometimes, have even been consider… monsters. My job will be trying to convince you otherwise. How the rats are as cool as the lions, the abyssal fishes as cute as the peacocks, and The shark as innocent as the cow.

I know you might have strong preconceptions about some of the creatures that we are going to be talking about. But here I ask you to trust on me, I am going to make my best effort to keep any possible trigger at the bare minimum. Nothing is going to harm you, and quite opposite, we are going to have fun and learn cool stuff.

Today we are going to start… chill, with a very small and mostly harmless friend. Today we are going to talk about mites.

Maybe you don’t know too much about them, maybe you are more familiar with their cousins, the ticks, and even though they both belong to the same group, the Acari, and you can even argue that they are also mites, I am not going to include them today, since I would prefer to talk exclusively about Ticks on another occasion.

Maybe you have other references from them, maybe you like gardening and the sole mention of the name red spider mite, Tetranychus urticae, makes you go cranky. And with this it seems like that’s the only thing that mites are good at, being pests and cause a lot of havoc, either to public health or economic interests. Today I am going to prove you that this is not the case.

But, before going into any detail, lets start from the beginning. what is a mite?

Mites, as well as ticks, belong to the subclass Acari, which is part of the Arachnida class. Yes, the same Arachnida that spiders and scorpions belong to, they all have in common having 8 legs and lack any type of wings or antennas. The thing that set Acari apart is that, except for their mouth parts, all the segments of their bodies have merge together, given them their very characteristic round and compact chape.

And compact is the keyword here, their main evolutionary tendency has been extreme body miniaturization. They are between the smallest animals in existence, most of them are smaller than one millimeter in length: that is smaller than a pinhead. As you can imagine, this has a lot of consequences.

When you try to lift something for example, the strength that you have do not depends on the length or the general size of your muscles, it depends on the cross-sectional area of them, how thick they are lets say. The smallest is an animal, the biggest is the proportion of this area regarding the size of the rest of the body. This is the reason why some ants an beetles can lift tens of times their own weight without any problem. So… you might expect that with an animal as small as a mite.

It has been reported that Archegozetes longisetosus, one mite species, can exert holding forces of at least 1180 times their own weight. This is a lot; they are at least 5 times stronger than what you would expect from their size. And something similar happens for the speed of movement, Paratarsotomus macropalpis can run up to 192 body lengths per second. To give you an idea, if we escalate this to our human body size, it would be like lifting 5 city busses and run almost at a supersonic speed. This makes the mites, relative to their size, the fastest and stronger creatures in the world, a true superhero (Rubin et al. 2016), (Heethoff and Koerner 2007).

And they kind of need it, actually. They make a lot of effort to walking on, or more accurate, through the terrain. According to the size-grain hypothesis, the environmental rugosity of a surface increases significantly with the decreasing on body size of walking organisms, this means that even the plainest surface for us would be an intricated hiking route for them.

But even being that strong and fast to hike through huge mountains and crags, you still have a huge movement constrains being that small, mostly when you cannot fly as insects. How do they colonize new environments? Well, they have options here.

First one is, let that other carry you. They just wait that a big enough animal, usually a mammal, pass through, and then jump on it. This is called phoresy and in opposition to what ticks do, these mites do not feed on their hosts, they just use their furry friends as trains.

If there is no furry train schedule soon, the second option is… using the wind itself, some of them are so small, that they can roll up into a ball and launch themselves to the air to being transported by a strong wind. The last option is, doing this same thing, but with additional help.

As I said before, they are arachnids, this means that some of them can produce some silk, not with the same complexity than spiders but, the only thing that they need is produce a thread long enough that it is dragged by the wind and takes them off the ground, acting like a windsail, this is call ballooning, and it’s a very cool technique to tame the air.

This amazing dispersal capacity have allowed them reach very distant and different places. I mean, in an evolutionary scale, they have had plenty of time to do so, this group appeared at least 400 m.a. ago, way before dinosaurs, or even before anything resembling a reptile exist. They were between the first animals to colonize land environments. There is no surprise that they have adapt to exploit a very broad type of habitats and resources. Mites could be predators, parasites, phytophagus, mycophagus and saprophagus, practically they eat on everything. There are water mites, soil mites, flour mites, sugar mites, gall mites, dust mites… there are soo many ecological niches that these creatures occupy that I could create a hole podcast talking about them, so I will just stop in a couple of them.

……

Some mites have a very close relationship with bees. Some of them are not so nice, but besides the Varroa, a common parasite in Bee hives, there are other mites that have positive symbiotic relations with the bees.

Imagine a beehive: a very humid and enclosure space, full of storage food. It is a perfect spot for fungus and bacterial infestations. Bees work very hard and have multiple strategies to keep their nest clean; you know, a contaminated house can compromise your own and even your children health! Luckly, there are some mite species that feed on this fungus and help to keep clean the nests. This job is so important that some bees have even evolved a specialized structure call acarinarium, which is… basically a mites-pocket, they carry working mites here when they found them outside and bring them home.

This duality between the parasitic and beneficial mite is more common that it seems. As I said before, there are multiple mite species well known between the gardeners for being awful plagues. But one of the best controls for these plagues are… other mites. There are predatory mites that hunts a keep these parasitic mites at bay. So, the use of insecticide that do not make a difference between different types of bugs could be sometimes… counterproductive.

And the thing is that, Predatorial mites are not weird at all, a lot of Gamasid and trombidiform mites are the terror of the soils for a lot of small invertebrates. Besides other mites they can also prey anelids, collembolans, insect eggs and even nematodes. Either by active chasing, like a tiny cheetah, or by passive hunting, setting their palps and forelegs as traps for unwary passing preys.

And now that we mentioned the soil, Lets talk about soil mites. They are between the most abundant animals in the soil. “A single square meter of temperate forest soil may contain more than 250.000 mites from hundreds of different families.” As these numbers suggest, they are very important decomposers in the soils. But not that much for the brute amount of organic material that they can process into nutrients useful for plants, I mean, for that earthworms are way more efficient. Instead, given their movement patterns through the soil, they play a key role in the cycle of special nutrients as calcium, and the dispersal of some bacteria and fungi, which are important nutrient recyclers.

Mites have conquered all types of soils, and considering that, even the smallest differences in humidity, deepness of grainsize in these terrains will represent huge differences in their microcosmos level, they have a broad range of adaptations of these places.

In sandy, dry and poor nutrient soils mites tend to resemble their primitive Devonian ancestors, the ones who used to live in very similar conditions when they first colonized land environments. Those that live in deep soils tend to be small, soft, and elongated to squeeze easily trough the very tight gaps in between mineral particles. When these deep soils are saturated, these gaps got filled with water, so the mites living there are effectively aquatic ones.

As you can see. Their great dispersal capacity, associated with their very small size and amazing ecological flexibility have made them very successful. They are the most abundant group of arachnids, with more than 55.000 described species around all the world, a number that might be even higher, considering how difficult to spot they are. They have a cosmopolitan distribution, which means that you can found them in any region of the world. Conquering nearly all the ecosystems, from marine and freshwater ones to the most arid desserts, from the tropical lowlands to alpine and polar habitats (Dhooria 2016).

I want to finish today with a poem called “A parable”, by no other than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle:

The cheese-mites asked how the cheese got there,

And warmly debated the matter;

The Orthodox said that it came from the air,

And the Heretics said from the platter.

They argued it long and they argued it strong,

And I hear they are arguing now;

But of all the choice spirits who lived in the cheese,

Not one of them thought of a cow.

You can find references and extra material at the description. This episode was produced by me, David Quinche Giraldo. Thanks for listening! And see you next time.