Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Hi all, I have some juvenile dragons that I bought at a show in September and yesterday my husband noticed that they have mites! I have been out of town all week so now I need to deal with it. My husband has snakes so we have occasionally gotten snake mites from live rodents and they are a HUGE pain, so I am bracing myself for a battle with lizard mites. Not AT ALL sure how they got these mites, I wash all their produce before they eat it and they get healthy crickets every day. They are the only two lizards we own and are separate from the snakes.

So, some questions.

Are these mites (the juvenile mites are red) spreadable to snakes?
What's the best way to get rid of them? Change their bedding and soak the dragons in betadine solution? Do this once a week at least? That's what I've been reading...

Are there any products safe to use on lizards? My husband has used Black Knight to kill snake mites in the past but I don't know if it's safe for lizards.

Suggestions, experience welcome.....

This has worked well for me:

Spray the enclosure with headlice bedding spray ( you can pick this up at Walmart ), this will clean any mites left in the enclosure and prevent them from traveling. I clean the dragons with a little mixture of dawn dish soap and water (in a spray bottle, don't spray their heads, just get some on a q-tip and dab it on the mites, the soap will kill them), then I also get some olive oil and put it on a q-tip and dab every mite I see. This smothers them and they will usually come off at this point. you can usually get them off with the q-tip or tweezers. Repeat the process every couple of days. It's a pain in the butt, but it gets rid of them without using fly strips or harsher chemicals. I use this procedure every time I get in one with them, and it works wonders.

Very simple:

Go to the pet store and buy mite off made by zoo med. Its carried almost everywhere at the pet stores. Take everything out of their enclosures. Soak everything such as logs and any furniture etc in a water/bleach solution for about 1-2 hours. Then thoroughly rinse and let fully dry. Bleach vapors are harmful so be careful. You should use like a 10% beach solution.

Or you could wrap everything in tinfoil and bake it.

Wipe the enclosure out with the 10% bleach water solution also. Make sure its fully dry and use just water afterwords to rinse it and wipe out.

Then you visually inspect your animals. Spray the mites with the miteoff. It kills them almost instantly. Remove any mites off their bodies and flush them... dispose of them etc.

Spray/treat their bodies (it has sodium laurel sulfate) 1% relatively harmless to reptiles. Rub it into their scales and treat their bodies. Dont dry them too much. Also spray and treat their furniture before putting it back into their enclosure for mites with the mite spray too.

I guarantee this will decimate the mites.

Started using this with snakes...

Keeping snakes for years. I have also found wild caught snakes that I have relocated to new areas, this one dusky pygmy rattler was covered in mites. I treated & rid it of mites and then relocated it.

Found one on my property about 5 years ago. I got it really fattened up and healthy then relocated near a lake deep in the Withalacoochee national forest. They have the most amazing eyes.
Native to Florida and other parts of the south.

Use the Black knight spray your husband uses for snake mites, according to the directions on the can. Wash and rinse the cage and cage furniture, probably best to toss out wooden cage accessories.

Soak your dragon's for about ten minutes, then you can use vasaline or olive oil on the mites lodged under the beard etc. Repeat the BK treatment of the cage in a month, then again a month later, to ensure any hatching mites don't reinfest your dragons.

On a side note, lizard mites are not the same as snake or rat mites, mites are very species specific though some will bite the wrong species if they can't find their preferred 'host', but they don't thrive as well. Thus your bearded dragons most likely had mites on them when you bought them, even if you didn't notice them before.
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PHLdyPayne