Please help me identify this Parasite/Mite!
Hello all,
I work at a Nature Center and I breed Flightless Fruit Flies and Dubia Cockroaches, among other things, for animal feed. About 3 months ago I returned to my job, after a few months off, and my fruit fly cultures were dead so we purchased some from Petco. I noticed that the cultures were not producing well and were dying early, and that there were tiny white moving dots in their cultures. I should have looked into it then, but I did not. Now these tiny white parasites/mites are getting into all of my Flightless Fruitfly cultures and in the last week they hit my Dubia Cockroach colony so hard that 80%+ of my Dubias are dead, and their corpses are over flowing with the pest. The surviving roaches are trying to clean themselves but the pests are getting in between their joins and covering their faces. They are also covering the back, it looks like dust but it's mites/parasites firmly attached to their exoskeleton.
Do you have ANY idea what I am talking about? I'm very worried for our animal collection. I think they transferred by way of regular fruit flies that were flirting with the tainted Petco cultures.
Please help me!
I don't know how to post pictures yet...
Contributed by Manimal on 25 September, 2013 - 1:54pm |