Tiny mites are living in everyone’s face, scientists say, and they have evolved with us
The mini arachnids can’t be evicted — though that’s probably for the best
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Your support makes all the difference.Tiny mites are living inside of everyone’s face, and there’s nothing they can do about it.
The tiny spider creatures have been living in there “since before we were human”, and they are mostly harmless.
Previously, scientists had thought that the mites lived on only around 25 per cent of people’s faces. But new DNA studies have found that everyone has the mites, and we probably inheret them from our family soon after we are born, reported California radio station KQED.
The mites appear to have been with humanity since we started out, and their evolution is closely tied to that of humans, according to Michelle Trautwein from the California Academy of Sciences who studies the small spiders. The two species’ family trees mirror each other and since humans originated in Africa there is a greater amount of genetic diversity in both humans and mites there, Trautwein says.
Trautwein is working to collect the mites from people’s faces and study them, in turn learning more about where they come from and how they get there. Finding them involves scraping a sample from people’s faces and then putting it through DNA tests.
It’s those tests that showed that all people seem to have the mites, rather than the much smaller number originally presumed. Despite their huge number, they don’t seem to be causing many problems — though they can sometimes be linked with skin problems, they are mostly harmless.
And it isn’t clear how many mites are on our bodies.
“What’s crazy is that we actually have mites all over our body,” said Trautwein. “We have mites that live in our ears, that live on our face, that live on our eyebrows, versus our eyelashes, versus our genitals, versus our nipples.”
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