Common dust mites in the home are not actually insects at all. Instead, they belong to the class Arachnids -- which includes spiders and the subclass acarina that includes ticks. Long believed to be solitary animals in general, several species of spiders and one species of mites, spider mites, have been shown to cooperate within species groups in building nests and raising young. This is the first evidence that house dust mites share some rudiments of sociality.
House dust mites, nearly microscopic creatures that inhabit every crevice of our lives and make us sneeze has long been assumed to be solitary in behavior. Now new research has shown that they are actually quite social.
A group of ethologists -- animal behaviorists -- have demonstrated that these mites migrate through our homes in crowds. They like the occasional communal road trip, and they follow each other using some signal, perhaps chemical, to chose the route more traveled.
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