Mites... Confusion.

Hi all,

Got a ball python from a rescue 3 weeks ago, she is feeding great and a very friendly girl. I was handling her yesterday and found a mite on my arm. I checked her over and couldn't find any more; checked around eyes, nose, mouth, under chin, belly scales etc. I cleared the substrate (newspaper), cleared the tank and checked her hides for mites. I use old shoe boxes as hides so I took them out and broke apart to try and find the little buggers, I could only find 2 mites in the entire vivarium, no faeces, no eggs, nothing.

I cleaned the viv, hoovered it all (corners etc) and the surrounding room. I have put her on white paper towel and made new hides and given her a new water bowl. I am just really confused how I have had no sign of any for three weeks and then I only find so few mites and no other sign, has anyone else had a similar experience? Any advice on how to move forward with it? Help greatly appreciated.

Cheers

I might add that I don't have any other reptiles so no contamination on my part. I had also bathed her the day before, don't know if that would have any impact on me finding them?

You're on the right track to diagnose a mite infestation. I would just monitor over the next couple weeks and watch for any little reddish dots on the paper towels. Also check the animal everyday.

I have/had similar experience with my new addition. On inspection he looked fine, but after about 10 days I've found small black things under his scales not a lot maybe 3 little specs.

After about another week so let's say 3 weeks I've seen these little bugger crawling over my lil baby.

I went bonkers, threw everything out, bought new box, hides, water bowl and everything. I'm using BioKill on the box itself and surroundings, it's basically the same as NIX solution based on permethrin and water. But it's widely available in all stores.

You should check the thread that was about my snake, and search forum for any other mite threads.
Here's mine: http://ball-pythons.net/forums/showt...with-my-new-BP

What you have done is great, but as far I understand you should use, something to disinfect everything. You can get PAM - Provent-A-Mite which is some sort of a spray based on permethrin again that kills adult mites, eggs and everything in between. Same does the BioKill or NIX solution. Both are also permethrin based.

Hope this helps a bit.

Thanks for the quick replies. Will look into getting some anti-mite treatments today.

properly identify the species. this is incredibly important when you want to treat it right. are you sure that it was a reptile mite, does it match what you see when you search the internet for pictures of reptile mites?

for example, there are free-living 8-legged predatory mites out there, and they wont harm your reptiles but they hunt down springtails and other tiny insects and cut them in pieces and eat them.

biodeversity is high at tiny length scales. when you are in the 1mm range (wolframalpha says thats 0.03937 inches, damn these outdated units that only the USA, Liberia and Myanmar use), basically the amount of possible species is very high, and reptile mites are only one species.


if you identify the species, chances are that the right thing to do is to do absolutely nothing.

I am not certain the species of mite, it was however certainly a blood feeding mite. It burst when I squeezed it between my fingernails. Do you know of any resource that help one to properly identify mite species? The mites were small (pin-head size), purplish black and were living in the crevices in the hide.

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Originally Posted by TheSnakeGuy

You're on the right track to diagnose a mite infestation. I would just monitor over the next couple weeks and watch for any little reddish dots on the paper towels. Also check the animal everyday.

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Reddish dots?

Well it could be ticks also. So yeah double check !

They were certainly black not red, a little larger than many of the photos of red mites I have seen online.

Yeah mine are also black black, but can't really identify what the creatures are :3 i've been treating for mites/ticks. And I don't see any live any more.

Snake mites start off their life being clear colored, they turn darker and eventually get black as they fill up with blood. The only way to be assured of getting rid of snake mites is to use a poison like Provent-a-mite or one of the other permetherin based poisons. You need to follow directions exactly and don't over do it as you want to kill the mites not your snake.

Some people will recommend various baths or oils or other homeopathic remedies, these remedies do kill a lot of mites but they are generally not very effective over the long term. Unless you have a very light and very recent infestation, you'll have mites over and over again as new generations hatch. Mite eggs are very resistent to poisons and one of the benefits of the permetherin bases poisons is that it stays in the environment long enough to catch and kill new mites as they hatch thus breaking the cycle.

There are plenty of how to's on this forum. I've posed my thread here for you to check beside others.

Here's a HOWTO guide by AaronP which you can use.
http://ball-pythons.net/forums/showt...it-with-AaronP

Hope it helps and clears things up ;)

Does anyone have any experience with Callington Mite Spray? My local reptile shop sells it but it isn't cheap. Don't want to buy it if it is substandard/ poorly thought of/ dangerous.

Thanks for that jxl. I saw your previous thread, informative.

some photography with high resolution and/or a macro lens would certainly be helpful right now.

generally, a hard shell and a hard body tends to be bad news, because blood-suckers and parasites tend to wear armor like that. the harmless ones often have a body that is so soft that they turn into a smudge, you dont feel them with your fingers because they are too soft and your finger is too hard.

Definitely hard bodied and 'feelable'. Took my fingernails to pop, currently at work but will try to upload some photos this evening. I am pretty sure they are snake mites after trawling the forums/ google images etc, but I just confused about how few there were and how little evidence there was in the viv. I do keep a pretty sterile set-up which I guess is good of things like this but I would have expected to see some.

It it okay to remove the for a couple of days hides whilst I am diagnosing? I don't really want to stress her if I can help it but I dont want an infestation.

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Originally Posted by JRBrett

Definitely hard bodied and 'feelable'. Took my fingernails to pop, currently at work but will try to upload some photos this evening. I am pretty sure they are snake mites after trawling the forums/ google images etc, but I just confused about how few there were and how little evidence there was in the viv. I do keep a pretty sterile set-up which I guess is good of things like this but I would have expected to see some.

It it okay to remove the for a couple of days hides whilst I am diagnosing? I don't really want to stress her if I can help it but I dont want an infestation.

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for mites, when you strip down the enclosure, the minimum is 1 water bowl with fresh water, 1 hide, and paper towels as substrate.

i would recommend you use PAM, provent-a-mite, follow the instructions to the letter. do not use a variety of products, and using any product directly on the reptile will not be necessary, using anything directly on the reptile will only increase risks. mites are difficult to exterminate, but when there are only a few right now, you can definitively hold out for a few days until provent-a-mite arrives.

additional hides and decoration and fake plants can be treated, just spray it with a bit of PAM, and then bag it up airtight in plastic bags and store it away for a month. after a month or two of starvation, dehydration, and toxicity against insects and arachnids, anything remotely resembling any insect or mite will be dead, and you can take it all out of the bag, wash it, and use it safely. so there is no need to throw stuff away, you can cure it.

overdoing it with too much chemicals and combining many different products is more dangerous for your snake than the mites themselves, some people manage to poison and kill their reptiles this way. so keep a cool head and buy the best product and follow the instructions, and even a 10-day-delay is no problem.

(there only is a hurry when someone has a large collection, because mites can bite one reptile, then walk to the next enclosure and bite a different reptile, transmitting diseases while spreading through the collection. with 1 snake this is not an issue.)

and keep in mind that while i now think it may really be reptile mites, we are not sure about that, but it now seems likely. insects with hard shells are bad news.

This is what I've been using lately. Picked it up in the camping supplies department at Walmart. Same ingredients but much cheaper then what you can find in a pet store.

http://img.tapatalk.com/d/14/07/01/gu5y9emu.jpg

OP is in the UK. He doesn't have access to PAM, NIX, RID, or any of the other permethrin-based products available in the US.

IIRC Callington's is what the folks across the pond typically use to treat for mites - just follow the directions exactly.

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Originally Posted by bcr229

OP is in the UK. He doesn't have access to PAM, NIX, RID, or any of the other permethrin-based products available in the US.

IIRC Callington's is what the folks across the pond typically use to treat for mites - just follow the directions exactly.

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Are there NO permetherin based products available in the UK at all? I didn't know that.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Pythonfriend

some photography with high resolution and/or a macro lens would certainly be helpful right now.

generally, a hard shell and a hard body tends to be bad news, because blood-suckers and parasites tend to wear armor like that. the harmless ones often have a body that is so soft that they turn into a smudge, you dont feel them with your fingers because they are too soft and your finger is too hard.

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Can you check than this, which was taken high res with macro lens ! ;)
http://shrani.si/f/1o/uJ/4Dr9PxhU/timg3072.jpg
http://shrani.si/f/z/lj/3xaj1WMG/timg3078.jpg
http://shrani.si/f/1s/96/1VTTzevZ/timg3079.jpg

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As far the thread goes

OP should have access to BioKill it's sold widely over Europe. I had the same problem except that NIX could be found at some pharmacies. And I also wrote a thread ~ 1 month ago about this substitute. It's permethrin dilluted with water.

Here's the link for one online store from UK that sells it so I presume it's available everywhere like here where you can get it mostly all grocery shops.

http://www.suttons.co.uk/Gardening/G...ler_240855.htm

And here's the link to what this actually is:
http://www.jesmond.co.at/wp-content/...BKC-MKTG-E.pdf

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Originally Posted by MarkS

Are there NO permetherin based products available in the UK at all? I didn't know that.

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I'm not saying there won't be any permethrin products at all, just that they will have different brand names. The products specifically named "PAM", "NIX", and "RID" may not be available overseas.

He could look for the 1% permethrin head-lice treatments in the drug stores, mix 60 ml of product to 4 liters of water, which is the equivalent of our 2 oz of product per gallon, which yields a 0.015% permethrin solution.

Concentrated permethrin is often found at farm/livestock stores, the OP could try to find it there, and dilute it. Here in the States you can get Permethrin-10 which is 10% permethrin, 8 oz is about $8 at Tractor Supply. Mix 3 ml of that in 2 liters water gives a 0.014% solution, which is the same strength as the NIX/RID solution.

While PAM is a 0.5% permethrin solution, which is very strong, only a light spray is used. The NIX/RID/P-10/etc are mixed with water and applied with a squirt bottle, so a lot more liquid is applied to the surfaces of the enclosure.

And with all of these I don't recommend applying any permethrin product directly to the snake. I know some people do it, but I won't, as permethrin poisoning can cause permanent neuro damage.

ETA: Just saw the link for the BioKill. That will certainly work, OP just needs to realize it's a 0.25% permethrin product, which is quite strong.

Thanks for the help from everyone. Very informative. I ended up buying Callingtons from a local store. It was accessible and the online reviews were reasonable. I am away in two weeks on an expedition to Africa and have a housemate looking after her. Wanted to get it sorted ASAP as I don't want to leave him that responsibility.