Mites!!!!!!

I was looking in my emps tank and i saw a lot of mites crawling on the wall by the heat lamp their not on my scorpion Ive onley had desert animals before so i really dont know what to do i onley know their harmful and dont have any money for new substrate any ideas????

Are you sure they're not crickets?
I've only dealth with crickets and they suicide themselves in the waterdish.

yeah im sure their tiny beetle looking things

The could be little crickets if there are many of them I recomend cleaning the substrate out and cooking it or baking it. If there are only a few don't worry all tropical enclosures get a few. The best thing to do is clean up after your scorp and make sure theres no dead bugs around.

If they ARE mites, the ones you can actually see moving around are the good ones, so don't panic.

From our Scorpion Glossary:

~Abyss~ wrote:

Mites - little arachnids that sometimes live on and around scorpions. If you can see them and they run, they're good. If they're almost too small to see and congregate in large numbers WITHOUT moving, they're bad.

Even an surplus of good mites can be a bad thing. You dont want a lot but a few are actually helpful.

ive seen a few mites on my scorp (the good ones) before and they dont seen to bother her at all.

I have some mites in my P. imperator tank. I brought in two rocks from outside and put them in the tank. The rocks have tiny gray mites all over them. The rocks are covered by live moss and I don't want to get rid of the rocks or the moss(the moss adds character to "Thurman's" tank). Plus "Thurman" has burrowed right in between the two rocks. I wouldn't want to screw up his burrow.

What should I do???

(I heard that isopods might help control the mites, but I don't know...)

Order predatory mites and stick them in. They kill off the bad mites and eventually each other. I wish I still had the link to give ya for ordering, but I don't.

Once again, odds are that if you can easily see the mites, they're not the bad kind. I've actually never seen an "infestation" of predatory mites -- just small population booms when the scorpion has leftovers.

Take out the leftovers, take out the mitetropolis. No worries.

if it looks like this one then there good

may i remind that there is good mites out there, most mites you will find it good ones, unless you have alot of dead crickets and stuff lying around.. then they can be bad mites..

^Or those are just the good mites having a feast.

My 3i p.imps have mite on them that look like specsof dust (one or two of my 3i's) what do i do? wait for it to shed again?

try getting some predatory mites, I have a small colony of them and they are breeding like sewer rats. just flick a few onto the affected scorpion.

suppose i gotta get some going, shall i cut off a crickets head and stick it in the tank?

How on earth am i gona get a 3i to hold still long enough? lol

just get some soil from one of your tanks, a few mites, and stick it in a super-humid non ventilated plastic box.

worked wonders for me


also, these mites you are seeing; do they move around? pr do they congregate aroung your scorpions eyes, joints, etc. ?

Yay for five-month old gravedigging . . . at least it wasn't a useless post.

Anywho, enough of my sarcasm. "Speck of dust"-sized mites makes me think grain mites (the bad kind) -- if they stay around the joints and don't move, then that's what they are. Try introducing predatory mites as has been suggested (they look like bigger specks of dust that run around).

If they're running around, they're the good kind and nothing to worry about.

They just stay there around tthe joints.... what damage can they cause?

Mike mike mike.....

I thought rather than starting a new thread use the ever so helpful search function...... and look what i found!!

I know, I'm just weird like that. No harm done.

It sounds like they're the bad kind. Try predatory mites -- when your guy eventually molts, remove the old exoskeleton and transfer him to a new container as soon as he's hard enough to move (you can probably move him immediately after the molt, but it might be dangerous -- I've known people to help a molting scorp out of its exo).

I assume that in large quantities they would suck yummy nutrients out of your scorpion and negatively impact its health.

And I think it would probably stress the scorpion out as well, plus I think they have caused moulting problems in a few of my scorpions.

Ha ha ha we cool Mike,

in the future i'll try not to resurrect old threads, but as a lesser topic i thought it ok.

No harm done and quite usefull too in the bargain...