Carpet bug - microscope

cometcatcher (Kevin) · #1 14-02-2014, 01:52 AM

Was wondering why my cat was itching and scratching so much. Even took him to the vet. They said it was probably an allergy. Then when I was playing with him in the living room I had a couple of these crawl over me. Think I found out why puss is itchy!

I mounted it on a microscope slide for a more gooderer view. Pics taken through a cheap Omax microscope at 80x and 200x in darkfield. The white stuff around it is it's guts coming out where it got squished on the slide.

acropolite (Phil) · #2 14-02-2014, 08:18 AM

Bugs can be nasty critters, IMO doctors often misdiagnose skin complaints caused by bugs. HRH once had an itch which the doctor incorrectly diagnosed as an allergy, turned out it was caused by roving european fowl mites, common on the feral birds that europeans bought with them to Australia. If you have any bird nests in your roof you will have fowl mites, when the fledglings leave the nest the mites go wandering looking for a meal.
The interesting thing is that we wouldn't have known had I not retrieved a book called "The life that lives on man" after a workmate tossed it in the bin, in the book was the exact description of tye problem HRH was having. We spotted what looked like a mould patch on our cornice, on closer inspection it was a centimetre diameter swarm of critters almost too small to see naked eye.

cometcatcher (Kevin) · #3 14-02-2014, 03:30 PM

This is truly disgusting. This louse, mite or whatever it is was full of bacteria! I did an overnight wet mount culture to see what develops and 12 hours later the entire slide is seething with bacteria! You don't want to be bitten by one of these!

Phase contrast with a 40x objective yielding about 400 - 800 x with a 2x adapter, Pentax K-x DSLR.

leon · #4 14-02-2014, 04:19 PM

Bloody hell, all that from one miserably little bug.

Leon

cometcatcher (Kevin) · #5 14-02-2014, 08:43 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by leon

Bloody hell, all that from one miserably little bug.

That is only a small fraction of the bacteria on the slide. But of course the bug didn't carry it all. Bacteria double in population every 20 minutes I think. But there would have been a few in the first place to get as many as I saw.