Archives of The Cold Blooded News

The Newsletter of the Colorado Herpetological Society

Volume 31, Number 4;   April, 2004

Snake Mites!

by Michael Kraft

I've done a quick survey of a few members, and lots of people have had bouts with mites, mostly from snakes they obtained via the rescue and adoption program. The head of our rescue committee, Sasquatch, is famous for his recurrent battles with mites. So what are these little creatures and how should you react? The snake mite is a parasite, meaning that it lives by sucking the blood out of your snake. It has a life cycle of several stages, from egg to mature adult. Depending on temperature, from the time an egg is laid until the mite is able to lay its own egg could be from 7 to 21 days. The adults live from 10 to perhaps as long as 40 days, and a typical female can lay 60-80 eggs in her life. During a few of those stages, the mites hide away in dark crevices. In other stages, the mites are extremely mobile, and able to travel 11 inches per minute, or potentially 55 feet per hour! While they are feeding, the mite finds a suitable spot on the snake and sucks some blood for a meal. In particular, they seem to like the grooves around eyes, but they can be found anywhere between the scales. After a full meal, they drop off and wander away until they are hungry again. During its wanderings, the mite has a peculiar characteristic: it travels in a straight line. If there is an obstacle in its path, such as a tank wall, the mite just crawls straight up. In short order, that mite is outside your tank, and crawling straight down. Hopefully, you only have a single tank in that room, and the mite will never find its way back. Ha! As if that's likely. Instead, if you are like me, the mite almost immediately runs into another tank wall, and climbs straight up again. This time, the mite ends up inside the neighboring tank, and by this time it feels ready to lay eggs. That's why mites are not a problem with individual snakes: they are a problem with your whole collection.

The best advice is that if you ever see a single mite in any tank, you should assume that every tank in the room is infected, and take no chances. The good news is that mites drown. So if their straight line of travel takes them up and into the water dish, it's good-bye mite. Often, the first clue you'll see when you get mites is black specks in the water dish. They look like flakes of pepper, except that if you look closely, they have legs.

A good strategy at that point is to replace any substrate with white paper towels. That way, you can easily see any mites crawling around, and remove all doubts in your mind. If you put the snake's enclosure on legs standing in a tray full of water (a protective "castle moat"), the mites could never spread to another tank. That might be OK for a single quarantine tank, but who can make that work for a big collection? In the wild, mites aren't such a bad problem. The snake does pick up a few mites over time, but each shed lets the snake crawl away from all its external parasites for a fresh start. However, trapped in a small enclosure, the snake can't get away. Those mites can multiply many times over what could happen in nature, and the snake can be miserable. In worst cases, the mites can transmit disease from snake to snake, and can actually be the cause of death.

We caused the problem by shutting up our animals in small cages, so it's up to us to fix things. Time to roll up your sleeves. Herpers have had to deal with mites for many years. They have discovered many different methods to get rid of the little beasties. Many of the oldest recipes depend on the fact that mites drown. The snake gets a bath in soapy water, or dilute Listerine mouthwash, or even is covered with mineral oil. Of course, the mites try to crawl towards the head, and you can't just drown your snake, so that area takes some special work with a Q-tip. Other remedies rely on special veterinarian medicines, such as Ivermectin, which can be sprayed on or injected. Ultimately, you've got a clean snake.

Are we done now? I wish it were that simple. Remember, the problem started because the enclosure is magnifying the mite problem. Now that you've got a clean snake, you need to face the reality that your tank is full of mite eggs and immature mites, and all of them are going to be hungry pretty soon. See my point? You're not done yet. So, next you pull everything out of the tank, and sterilize it. Heat also kills mites, so one remedy is to put the tank in the sun on a hot day with saran wrap for a lid, so that internal temperatures are above 131 degrees for several hours. But who gets hot sunny days on demand, eh? More likely, the old timers would wash the tank with dilute bleach, or dilute Listerine, or even soapy water. Think you're done? Think again! I hate to tell you, but those rugs and drapes near the tank are crawling with mites, just ready to strike out in a straight line. If even one of those lines intersects a tank, the problem begins all over again. For the room, some people used to use No-Pest strips (or cat flea collars), and they even put them into the tank with snakes, but today they are increasingly considered too dangerous to the animals. Mothballs kill mites, but they also kill snakes. Don't ever use them in the tank, but you can put a mothball into the vacuum cleaner bag. What a hassle!

Thankfully, today's herper has two other options, aerosol spray cans containing Black Knight Roach Spray or Provent-a-Mite. Both can be sprayed directly on the snake, into the tank, and around the tanks. Both are powerful. Black Knight has been around for years. In fact, one of the most respected sources of information about snake mites on the Internet, Vida Preciosa International, has this to say: "If there is a silver bullet for snake mites, this is it." The people behind VPI have been involved with trading and breeding snakes for many years, and have never had a mite problem. Their strategy is to take EVERY new snake, spray it lightly with Black Knight, mist some into an open grocery bag, and place the snake in the bag for 30 minutes. Any mite on the snake will be history. Deal with the rest of the gear (tank, snake bag, old cage furnishings) outside of your home, and you'll never have a mite infestation. Don't stop yet. Use Black Knight in the car where the snake was transported and any other place the mites might have left the snake. Lots of people think that mite eggs can stick around for a very long time, and suddenly start up a new infestation. There is no proof of that. Mostly what happens is that mites are not completely eradicated by tools such as the Listerine method, or they hitchhike back into your collection after you have handled a friend's infested snake. By using an aerosol spray around the outside of the cages after an infestation, you go after the lingering pockets of mites that can cause you so much grief, and you put up a protective barrier against hitchhikers. Black Knight is so effective that there are many stories of someone using just a quick puff on a tank at one side of a pet store, only to find every cockroach and cricket dead in tanks on the far side of the room. Clearly, it is a powerful way to end the life of mites. In fact, if you've got tarantulas, hissing cockroaches, or millipedes at home, you should exercise extreme caution with either aerosol product.

The newer product, Provent-a-Mite, is supposed to linger longer, and be equally effective against mites. Some people think it's much better than Black Knight, but there is at least one story of a snake that died after Provent-a-Mite was used. Black Knight isn't perfect either. In truth, it's the same decontamination spray that the airlines for many years routinely sprayed on human passengers inside arriving jetliners. Personally, I have sprayed a yearling cornsnake and a hatchling milksnake with no apparent harm, but a 10 gram cornsnake hatchling, which had shed its skin only two hours earlier, had a 24 hour bout of twitching following it's welcome home decontamination spray. Thankfully, it recovered just fine, but there are some rare stories of snakes dying from Black Knight.

But don't think that the other methods are without danger. The Listerine method has also reportedly killed snakes, as has the plain water soaking method. Of course, we don't know how much spray those people used on the snakes that died, or what was the temperature of the water the snake soaked in. Use common sense! You don't have to drench your snake with the aerosols, and use the right temperature water if you give your snake a bath. No matter what method you decide to use, research it and follow the directions carefully.

The latest weapon against snake mites is only just being tried, but with some success, and it might be the best thing yet. People have discovered that predatory mites will eat snake mites, and when the snake mites are all gone, the predatory mites just disappear. The best recipe for using predatory mites is still evolving, but one person reported that the predatory mites did not work when the snakes were on paper towel substrate, but worked perfectly when the snakes were kept on a thin bed of soil to keep the predatory mites happy. Maybe we'll all learn this new technique and won't have to expose our animals to even a tiny risk of harm. I haven't mentioned everything in this article, but I've at least touched the major themes to give you some idea about what's out there. In our mission of rescuing animals, we ARE going to face mites, but they don't have to win. Good luck.

(For more information, visit www.vpi.com "The War Against Snake Mites" where you can find a lot more details about the life cycle and the battle plan against these little bugs.)