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There are two species of mites that live on human faces. Both look like wall plugs with legs, although one (Demodex folliculorum) is longer and rounder of bottom than the other (Demodex brevis). “Demodex” means “the worm that bores into fat,” which gives you a clue about their lifestyles. They bury head-down into our hair follicles, slurping up the oils we secrete.
We know they become more common with age, and they seem to be on every adult face — your face, my face, even Scarlett Johansson’s face. They’ll have accompanied James Cameron to the bottom of the ocean and Neil Armstrong to the moon. They have lived with humans for most of our evolutionary history but they were only discovered in 1841. They are almost certainly the animals that we spend most time with, but they’re largely a mystery.
“It’s so shocking to imagine that we all have these animals living on our faces and we know so little about them,” says Michelle Trautwein at the California Academy of Sciences.
Her team, together with Michael Palopoli at Bowdoin College, have started to clarify our relationship with humanity’s actual best friends. The sampled mites from 70 American volunteers, either scraping the creatures up with a bobby pin, or simply pulling their DNA straight from swabbed foreheads. They sampled colleagues, friends, local students, or people who turned to “Meet Your Mites” face-sampling events. “A lot of diverse people come to our events,” says Trautwein.
Read full, original post: We Know Almost Nothing About the Animals That Live on our Faces
