- #1
aychamo
- 375
- 0
Hey guys
My class went into the forest to do vegetative analysis for ecology on Monday and I got my butt kicked by red bugs.
I'm itching like crazy, I could barely sleep last night.
But I'm wondering what causes the itch to be so bad? From what I've read, they inject a saliva that has enzymes that disolve skin cells. The body has an allergic reaction to the stylosome the bite forms. The chigger's feeding tube is stuck in the body and the body has to break down the tube?
So why does it itch, though? I'm assuming that the bite, or the feeding tube that the chigger leaves is what causes the body to mount an immune response. What is it about the immune response that makes things itch? What type of immune response is being mounted? Is it humoral? Would this be a type of contact dermititis? So weird...
--
A fascinating thing I read about them is that we itch when the chiggers bite us because of the reaction we have to theri bite, but the thing is we aren't their correct host! That's why we have the reaction. There is a species of chiggers in Asia and the Pacific whose host is humans and they don't cause an itching reaction on them There is one hell of an evolutionary adaptation!
My class went into the forest to do vegetative analysis for ecology on Monday and I got my butt kicked by red bugs.
I'm itching like crazy, I could barely sleep last night.
But I'm wondering what causes the itch to be so bad? From what I've read, they inject a saliva that has enzymes that disolve skin cells. The body has an allergic reaction to the stylosome the bite forms. The chigger's feeding tube is stuck in the body and the body has to break down the tube?
So why does it itch, though? I'm assuming that the bite, or the feeding tube that the chigger leaves is what causes the body to mount an immune response. What is it about the immune response that makes things itch? What type of immune response is being mounted? Is it humoral? Would this be a type of contact dermititis? So weird...
--
A fascinating thing I read about them is that we itch when the chiggers bite us because of the reaction we have to theri bite, but the thing is we aren't their correct host! That's why we have the reaction. There is a species of chiggers in Asia and the Pacific whose host is humans and they don't cause an itching reaction on them There is one hell of an evolutionary adaptation!