They mite be monsters

Face mites! I have the strangest conversations with my 5-year-old son. One of the latest involved face mites. 

I’m not even sure how it happened, but one morning we woke up and (after talking about banana sandwiches) started talking about face mites, which are tiny parasitic arachnids that live on nearly every human being’s face. I told him they eat dead skin (they do not; they eat sebum) and come out at night (which is true). Normally, they hide in our pores, gorging on the oil from our glands. They can live up to two weeks, and the reason they come out at night is to mate. Also, they are very good house guests, leaving no mess in their wake. 

I showed my son a photo of a face mite, to which he exclaimed, “Oh, how cute!” At this point, I suggest readers look up photos of face mites themselves (or click here). They are decidedly not cute. But beauty is in the eye of the beholder. To me, they look like tiny, though harmless, monsters.

When a baby comes into the world, he or she has no face mites. They are thought to be transmitted by their mother after birth, but I guess it depends on who touches the baby first. Still, that’s a strange thought: tiny, tick-like arachnids jumping from mother’s face to baby’s face. Thanks, mom! I never knew I had you to thank for face mites. 

Add them to the list of things we got but didn’t know until later: bacteria, yeast, and other gut flora. They are beneficial but are unseen and were not well understood until recently. Face mites and microbes, in general, are beneficial unless they get out of order, in which case, they can cause a number of problems. You can do what you want with the fact that you have face mites crawling all over your face while you sleep. I prefer to think of them as harmless guests. Have a party, guys! 

After seeing face mites up close, I’m reminded of other tiny monsters. Most bugs look like tiny monsters, too. Have you ever picked up a butterfly, which is one of God’s prettiest creations, and looked at its face up close? Horrifying! The same goes for just about every flying insect, even the dainty ladybug. The ugliest insects, though, are found on the ground, usually under something. If you pick up a rock and they run away, they’re definitely hideous. They look about as surprised as I do when I look in the mirror first thing in the morning and look just as awful. I’d like to crawl back under a rock, too.

Perhaps the most terrifying face is that of a hornet. With its big, black, dead eyes and an angry brow, it looks about as menacing as it acts. Once while on vacation in Ohio’s Hocking Hills, a giant wasp (and I mean giant; I don’t know how it even flew, it was so big) raided our campfire. It was so large, I had no trouble striking it out of the air with a fire iron and beating it to death. But when you kill a hornet, its blood cries out for vengeance, and soon there were more giant, angry hornets streaking through the sky. At that point, it was time to go inside. Talk about adding fuel to the fire. 

When I was a little boy, I found an ant lion under the eaves of our house in the soft, silty soil. If you don’t know what an ant lion is, it’s a predatory insect that builds a pit for ants to fall into, then it grabs them with its huge jaws. I knew what it was and decided to capture it, keeping it as a sort of pet in a mason jar. I fed it ants in successively larger sizes until it graduated to something bigger than it could handle. It was a sort of amateur insect fight club. 

I had a garden once upon a time and fought many battles until I won a sort of balance. Rather, nature balanced out my little scheme. I recall parasitic wasps laying their eggs on caterpillars’ backs, with the caterpillar unwittingly carrying around its deadly payload, not knowing its life was ticking away. The wasps essentially sucked the poor thing dry. I watched it wither until it finally succumbed. It was fascinating, though a bit morbid to watch.

One of my all-time favorite coolest bugs is the praying mantis, as it seems to possess a rare intelligence. You can tell what it is looking at, and when you get up close, what it is looking at is you. Having a bug size you up is a little humbling, but they often take on prey their size or larger, even eating birds on rare occasions. 

Another cool bug is the walking stick. I took a specimen to show and tell when I was in elementary school and held up the jar it was in, which for some reason made my teacher really excited, only she started talking about the jar (was it that unusual?). After a moment, the other kids started snickering because they could see the walking stick moving in the jar, and I said what was inside the jar was perhaps more interesting. What can I say? Walking sticks are true camouflage experts! 

A recent issue of National Geographic tells of a decline in insect numbers, which is a loss for all of us. I think of honeybees especially because they are true heroes and benefit mankind immensely. Without them, we’d be lost, and it’s the same with so many insects. Even the ones that live in our pores. Just as my son considered face mites beautiful, it benefits all of us to see insects the same way. The little things in nature are a big deal. And you don’t have to be 5 years old to think so. But it helps. 

Thank you for reading.