Unseen Creatures Having Sex On Your Face – While You’re Sleeping

Strange but true

by Gene Hers

May 15, 2023 | 4:42 p.m

You need to be prepared for this mite.

There are tiny mites called Demodex that live on most people’s faces — and they mate at night.

A terrifying new video shows and analyzes the ins and outs of these creepy crawly creatures.

A clip from the Journey to the Microworld YouTube channel shows footage captured by videographer and author of The Hidden Beauty of the Microscopic World, James Weiss, after he found a black spot on his head.

This black spot turns out to be the Demodex moth, which is less than a millimeter long and has eight tiny legs.

There are two different types of mites: Demodex folliculorum, which inhabits our hair follicles and eats skin cells, and Demodex brevis, which lives on our faces and near our sebaceous glands and eats the oil secreted from human skin, according to the Cleveland Clinic. .

During the day, they hang out inside our pores, and at night, they look for other mites on our faces to mate with.

“When they’re done, they go back into your pores to lay their eggs,” explained the show’s host, Hank Green.

An adult Demodex will lay about 20 to 24 eggs in your hair follicles, Green said, and within three to four days, the young ones will hatch.

“It will end its life after a few weeks, at which point the dead mites will decompose in your follicles or sebaceous glands, turning the little pockets of your skin into little graveyards for the mites,” Green said.

However, as alarming as all of this may sound, mites are harmless and are found in almost everyone.

“But here’s the thing, we pretty much all have,” Green explained in the clip. “If you’re watching this video, you probably have Demodex on your face. And if you don’t now, eventually you will.”

They were first discovered in 1841 by two scientists who couldn’t figure out what they were, according to Discover magazine, and first formally studied in 1842 by a German scientist named Gustav Simon.

Demodex are classified as arachnids, which are closely related to insects such as spiders and ticks, according to the Cleveland Clinic.

These mites are usually spread through “physical contact,” according to Green, but he also cited a 2015 study that found these mites are passed from family member to family member over generations.

“They’re not dangerous in the broad sense because we all have them and most of us seem to get along pretty well with them,” Michele Trautwein, an entomologist at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, told NPR in 2019.

“We share it mostly within family units, and it sounds like you might have been colonized at first soon after birth, most likely by your mother, who speaks traditionally in human history.”

And since they live in our pores, they can be hard to get rid of, but rarely can people put an excessive amount of them on their face, which creates a white sheen that some doctors describe as “demodefrosting.”

In the future, this Demodex moth could be a “symbiont” with us, according to Green and a 2022 study from the journal “Molecular Biology and Evolution.”

This means that moths and humans could depend on each other at some point – but that day hasn’t come yet.

According to Trautwein, Demodex and humans have always had a close relationship.

“We still have this old, very intimate relationship, and it seems clear that we’ve had all kinds of face mites with us throughout our history,” she said. “So it’s as old as our species, as old as it is Homo sapiens. “