For most people, walking through a museum is an interesting experience where you can catch a glimpse of many different things that you wouldn’t see in everyday life.

For researchers in Brazil, however, it became the subject of a new study that they published in the International Journal of Acrology.

The team was at the Zoological Collections Laboratory of the Butantan Institute in São Paulo, Brazil, when they saw a tiny spider that had small white bumps around.

Upon further research, they found that the bumps were actually parasitic spider mites. These mites burrow their face into the spider’s body in order to feed on its hemolymph (basically, it’s blood).

If the spider had lived, the larval spider mites would have grown up and then detached from the spider to live their lives in the soil, where they would eat small insects and other mites, but that has only been observed in Costa Rica in 2017. Ricardo Bassini-Silva is a researcher and curator at the institute, and in a statement explained:

“For this group of mites, it isn’t uncommon to know many parasitic species only through their larvae, since in adulthood they become free-living predators, living in the soil and feeding on small insects and even other mites, which makes them very difficult to find.”

There are many different species of spiders in Brazil, with over 3000 of them already known. Despite this, only one other type of spider-parasitic mite has been discovered so far. This is certainly an area where additional research is needed. Bassini-Silva touched on this, saying:

“With more than 3,000 species of spiders alone, Brazil has immense potential for discovering new parasitic mites.”

Having a sample with several spider mites in place allowed the researchers to take a close look at how they live at this stage of their life.

This may help them to perform additional research not just on their larval stage, but also to find them in the soil in the future.

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