[npaull]

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?

 

[frogparty]

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

 

[ChrisK]

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.

 

[james67]

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

james

 

[Ed]

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...

 

[frogparty]

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.

 

[Woodsman]

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.

 

[npaull]

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.

 

[sports_doc]

^ 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

 

[jsh21]

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.

 

[Ed]

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

 

[tim13]

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

 

[Reef_Haven]

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.

 

[Ed]

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

 

[gary1218]

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?

 

[Ed]

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

 

[GRIMM]

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.

 

[Ed]

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


Ed

 

[D3monic]

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.

 

[frogmanchu]

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.