Currently the only life stage annotations available for Mites and Ticks subclass
Acari are Adult/Egg/Juvenile. The crucial larval stage is missing! Oh no!
Please see this infested butterfly as an example of the larval stage.
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/29470581
For a nice larval closeup see this infested harvester
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/543144
Thank you!
Huh. It hadnāt connected for me until just now that the parasitic mites on spiders, beetles, bees, and other things are the larval stages of velvet mites. Hereās a random paper detailing what was known about the parasite-host relationships as of 1998: https://www.nhm.ac.uk/hosted_sites/acarology/saas/e-library/pdf000200/a000107.pdf
Edit: or are they technically juveniles?
Yes, I just learned today that the odd red parasites found on adult butterflies, grasshoppers, etc. are mites in the larval stage. Thanks for the article you linked which Iāll read later. Fascinating!
Think juvenile applies to an animal which has the same form as the adult, but is smaller. Perhaps the term means something different when applied to Arthropods.
Have a look at this para of the wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acari#Ontogeny
Due to the pretty variable development stages within mites and ticks, I think it is fine to subsume all of them before the adult stage under ājuvenileā.
Wow, quite a few stages egg, prelarval, larval, nymph (several instars) and finally adult. The challenge I have with just using ājuvenileā to describe a mite visibly infesting another organism is that sometimes it will be an actual larva and sometimes it will be a nymph, but most of the time it will resemble an egg to those unfamiliar with the manifold stages of mites. Three stages is too few in my view, but how many stages would be sufficient to balance accuracy with convenience?
2 posts were split to a new topic: Help with mite ID
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