A little bodily horror to help you celebrate your Jewish New Year. Happy 5773!

Just when I'm feeling all warm and fuzzy about science, I come across this, which I guess is a good reminder that scientists routinely alert us to horrors along with pretty pictures from other planets. What kind of horrors am I talking about today, you wonder? Oh, just the Demodex mite, a mite that lives on your face, has sex on your face, eats your face, dies on your face, and, when it dies, explodes its feces all over your face. Which apparently your face doesn't like--the mite's feces explosion may be the cause of Rosacea, according to a recent article in the Journal of Medical Microbiology.

Want to know more? Here are some fun facts I just found out about our buddy Demodex and his pals:

Picture from here, text from here.

• The mites spend most of their time buried head-down in our hair follicles, munching on your face.
• They’re most commonly found in our eyelids, nose, cheeks, forehead and chin. But they're not limited to your face! They've also been found in the ear canal, nipple, groin, chest, forearm, penis, and butt. Time to start squirming.
• Demodex mites do not have an anus and can therefore never get rid of their feces...while alive. Instead, they store their waste in their abdomen, which gets bigger and bigger until they die, at which point they decompose and release their waste all at once in the pore or whatever tiny hole they are hiding in at the moment.
• Their preferred place to have sex is at the rims of your hair follicles. 
• After sex, the female buries herself within a follicle or sebaceous gland, depending on the type of mite. Half a day later, she lays her eggs. Two and a half days later, they hatch. The young mites take six days to reach adulthood, and they live for around five more. 
• Did you catch that the entire life of the Demodex occurs over the course of two weeks or so? That means that, if you're harboring this vile creature, one (or more) of your pores is awash in feces every two weeks.
• Just like me, Demodex mites hate the sun. So, they only come out of your pores at night to find another mite to mate with. Think about this: while you sleep, nasty little mites are having sex on your face. *shudder*
• Wonder what your chances are of harboring these face-eaters? Well, there's good news and bad news on that front. Bad news first: If you're "elderly," your chances are close to 100%. If you're a newborn, GOOD NEWS, you do not have any Demodex in your face. We apparently collect the mites as we go about our lives, perhaps from direct contact with infected people, perhaps from dust motes on which Demodex have hitched a ride. Age also seems to have something to do with it--according to the author of the Journal of Medical Microbiology piece, "Mite density starts to rise in the sixth decade of life and stays at the same level until the eight [sic] decade of life. Mite density is very low in young adults, even though their levels of sebum production, a potential source of food for mites, are very high." So: if you're still relatively young, you are potentially mite-free. If you want to remain so, you should probably avoid rubbing your face on anybody else's face at night, particularly on the faces of people older than sixty. And vacuum a lot if you live with someone elderly--or better yet, have them vacuum for you.

Well, I've about exhausted the limited reading I've done on gross gross Demodex. But if you want to know more, I encourage you to read this and this and this! And then cheer yourself up by eating some apples and honey and wishing your Jewish friends happy new year.