What are Chiggers?
However, when a chigger attacks the venom produced by the feeding is of a different nature. As a part of the arachnid or spider family it should comes as no surprise that the venom reacts similar to all those dangerous poisonous spiders we are so eager to avoid. The area of the bite is actually destroyed by the venom leaving an open wound. While the chigger bite is significantly smaller than other spiders, the bite is no less toxic for its size. You might wonder then is it itchy instead of painful. The answer once again is its small size. An itch is in fact how our brains recognize small skin pain. The skin response is pain, but the lack of size sends the signal to the brain and instead of perceiving it as pain, we perceive it as an itch. Ask anyone who has been in the outdoors camping and they’ll take a dozen mosquito bites over a single chigger bite any day. The best medicine here is prevention. Chiggers are common to the southern United States. They are found in brush and grass and
Why do they bite us? How can we stop that horrible itching? Myths about chiggers are widespread. Many believe chiggers are some type of bug. Folklore tells us they burrow under our skin and die, that they drink our blood and that they can best be killed by suffocation with nail polish or bathing with bleach, alcohol, turpentine or salt water. Surprisingly, all these popular facts are just plain wrong. Chiggers are not bugs or any other type of insect. Chiggers are the juvenile (or larval) form of a specific family of mites, the Trombiculidae. Mites are arachnids, like spider and scorpions, and are closely related to ticks. Chigger mites are unique among the many mite families in that only the larval stage feeds on vertebrate animals; chiggers dine on us only in their childhood, and later become vegetarians that live on the soil. Chiggers are tiny-less than 1/150th of an inch in diameter. More than a thousand of them could line up across this page and still leave room for two or three h
