Mites are parasites that feed on animals blood. They are small and light coloured when young, but will become a red/black colour when older and filled with blood. They can move surprisingly far over a period of time, and will easily find their way into neighboring enclosures.

Snake Mites can often infect a whole collection after being introduced on a new addition. They are a parasite that feeds from your snakes blood.

Removal of Mites

First its best to remove the substrate if you can and use news paper or paper towels, this helps remove places for the mites to lay eggs and survive away from the snake. The snake may want to soak, this helps relieve the snake and helps to hopefully drown some mites.

Frontline

Is a powerful mite killer and is excellent to clean the enclosure and surrounding areas, this will kill any roaming mites and all eggs.. it will also provide a residue to help afterwards, however, make sure there is no strong residual smell remaining before a snake is placed back into its habitat. It is recommended to only using frontline directly on your snake in a diluted form, 50% should be sufficient, but not all people feel this is necessary. One method of applying it is to apply to a cloth and let the snake slither through it in your hand from head to tail, ensuring that none goes near the eyes or mouth. Also its best to remove the water bowl for a while after application in case the snake goes in the bowl and then drinks some water.

Hypoaspis miles – Predator mites

These guys are predatory mites and will hunt and kill all snake mites, and will also eat/kill their eggs! after all the bad mites are gone they will die of starvation. These guys need relatively high humidity to survive so you need to get the sprayer out a few times while they do their work. I used these after accidentally infecting a fairly large number of snakes from a new addition. The snakes were in racks so they spread quick! the predator mites did an excellent job of removing them and I definitely recommend using for large scale ‘problems’! Available from: Defenders Natural Biological Pest Control (find link)

Ivomec

An injection sometimes offered by Vet’s that can be given to kill the mites as they feed on the treated blood, I have heard that this can cause damage to reptile organs. It also of course does nothing to treat the mites in the vivarium, so this method is not recommend.

Oil

This has been used by smearing over with a cloth or the snake is bathed in it to starve the mites of air making them let go, or climb out of the scale their under. Seems a slightly messy idea, and would not rid your mite problem alone.