Chiggers

If you're never experienced chigger bites then you are one lucky person.

I remember as a child when visiting my grandmother in East Texas, that my brothers would complain about them after they'd been outside playing football with the cousins. The area around their sock line would be red and bumpy and they'd be complaining for days about the itching. It wasn't until we moved here a few years ago that I was able to sympathize.

In an effort to try and understand chiggers better, I've been doing a little online research. As usual.

Chiggers are tiny "trombiculid mites", possibly red if you can find them using a microscope. They are arachnids in the same family as spiders and ticks. They live in grassy areas, make contact with exposed skin, and crawl to a spot they like. It's the baby chiggers (larvae) that cause all the trouble. Apparently the adult ones are harmless. The little ones end up in areas where clothing is tight or skin creases because they can't crawl past that point. So that explains why most bites are in areas that cause the most discomfort and awkwardness when scratching. Their bite produces a type of enzyme that reacts with human skin and which the larvae enjoy feeding on. 

Here's a quote from MedicineNet for your reading pleasure:

Chiggers insert their feeding structures into the skin and inject enzymes that cause destruction of host tissue. Hardening of the surrounding skin results in the formation of a feeding tube called a stylostome. Chigger larvae then feed upon the destroyed tissue. If they are not disturbed (which is rarely the case because they cause substantial itching) they may feed through the stylostome for a few days.

The good news is that chiggers do not carry any known diseases. The only likelihood that you might become ill is from scratching so much that the site becomes an open sore and then gets infected.

I'm still not sure why the bites cause so much discomfort. But the itching is much worse than  almost anything else I know.

Prevention, I suppose, is the best cure. We do have bug spray that is supposed to be effective for things like ticks and chiggers, but we usually forget to use it.

I've wanted to blog about chiggers for some time, but until now the bites haven't been in areas suitable to take photos. My model this time is Daughter, who picked wild blackberries the other day for about an hour. She suffered for about a week with the bites on her arms.