are mites a normal household bug?

awesome thanks all! just wanted to make sure with all these creepy crawly bugs crawlin around

If you lived in Indonesia and had snakes invading your home, I would say yes they may be a common pest.

But since you live in Texas, I would call the exterminator and have him take a look ;)

just to give you an idea of how big the mite group is, there are over 5000 species of snake mite alone! there are a couple of hundred that infect terestrial inverts as well as ever other species on earth. bed bug are mites. i have been working with some species of mites for a little while now. mostly grain and predator mites. they are not really species specific (well some are) they are more "group" specific. an invert mite will not infect a snake and vise versa.

here is a picture of a snake mite i too a while back.

http://i134.photobucket.com/albums/q...entralcopy.jpg

i keep for getting to bring in samples of the predatory mites for pictures in my lab.

what you have crawling around you house aren't snake mites. they could be hundreds of different things given your location.

According to the info I got, snake mites generally lay their eggs outside of the enclosure, so almost anything you but from a pet shop could have mite eggs on it and when the temp/humidity requirements are met, they will hatch. Mite eggs can survive for months before hatching.
I used Provent-A-Mite to get rid of a mite break out once, and now I continue to use it to prevent another one. When I change out the snakes paper towels, I just lightly spray the top layer and let it dry. It doesn't take much. I average 2-3 months on one can...


Rob