A few years ago I went to a seminar given by Dave Barker of VPI. He told the the group that mites go through a nymph stage where they become air born. If I'm not mistaken incubation for mite eggs is 17 to 21 days. This means that to prevent another outbreak you need to use provent a mite on a continues basis.

Since then I have used provent a mite every three weeks. I have a pretty sizable collection, but I can honestly tell you that I have not had any sign of mites for at least five years.

Mites can also be an intermediate host for some nasty internal parasites. This means that mites have eggs of other parasites inside of them. They suck the blood of our snakes and inadvertanly deposite eggs of other types of parasites into our snakes blood stream. Hook worms and whip worms are two types of endoparasites that can be deposited into our snakes when they are bitten by mites. When there is an ecto(outer)parasite and endo (inner) parasite issue your snake will ussually become anemic. This can lead your snake to go into a weakened condition, which can allow for other problems to arrise.

Another change I have made in the last five years is to go to using newspaper as the substrate. I think this is lessoning the possibility of mites comming into my facility via other types of substrate such as pine shavings or other types of wood shaving products.

Good luck


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Brian Gundy

www.for-goodness-snakes.com

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