Cluelessbrain - Untitled

I am THRILLED by some facts I have finally learned. Look at this helpless, goofy creature. The way it moves is adorable. It is very very bad at it. Does this look like something capable of tunneling through flesh?? This is a scabies or “mange” mite and all I heard all my life is that they “burrow” into skin, but I’d always wonder how this animal does such a thing. It’s a fat blob with little soft feet and a teeny, tiny mouth. You hear that something burrows in flesh and you imagine something pretty sleek and bladed and sinister, not a chubby sweet potato!!!

Somehow the details of the process managed to elude me my entire life, maybe the whole question just slipping out of my mind before I’d look any further into it, but today I finally found a scientific paper with this beautiful juicy explanation:

“Mites placed on the skin secrete a clear fluid (presumably saliva) that forms a pool around their body. It appears that the stratum corneum is dissolved (lysed) and the mite sinks into a depression in the skin. As it sinks, legs I and II seem to move in a tortoise like fashion (digging, crawling/swimming motion). The action of the legs propels the mite forward as a tunnel-burrow in the stratum corneum is formed.”

Who would ever JUST call that “burrowing” and call it a day!? They don’t burrow into skin they MELT into skin!!! They melt skin and they waddle their way through the melting with their dumb little wiggle legs ““like a tortoise!”“ That’s so whimsical! It’s also terrible but that makes it even more whimsical! Horrible, sleepy potatoes just leak acid and dissolve into your body! It isn’t even the burrow per se that causes itching and pain, people can get actual wounds that don’t feel as shitty as a mange mite; the reason it feels like torture is your immune system freaking out around it, especially as the mite keeps laying eggs and pooping in there. The little potato monsters melts into your skin and lives in there and eats the skin soup but also poops in it. Nature made that! There are several species so nature thought she should make that more than once. I think she hates you but at least she’s funny!

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