Who likes shrews? These mites do!

My friend Allan Lindoe, fossil preparator extraordinaire, lives on an acreage near Athabasca and makes the journey south to Edmonton about once a week to carefully remove rocky matrix from around the skeletons of long-dead fishes, mosasaurs, and dinosaurs. Two cats share his home and frequently bring him presents of wild game. A few weeks ago I washed a mixed bag (literally) of a dozen shrews he had accumulated over the summer and fall of 2015. Chewed-on shrews are not easy to identify unless you know a lot about insectivore teeth, but based on tail length and known distributions of shrew species in Alberta, they were one or more of the masked shrew (Sorex cinereus), Arctic shrew (S. arcticus), pygmy shrew (S. hoyi) and/or dusky shrew (S. monticolus)*. Some of the shrews were rather decomposed, so I wasn’t expecting much from the washings, but I was pleasantly surprised: 6 species of mites! Members of both major lineages were present. From the Acariformes were Prostigmata (Myobiidae, Pygmephoridae and Trombiculidae) and Sarcoptiformes (Glycyphagidae). From the Parasitiformes there were larval hard ticks (Ixodida: Ixodidae) and what look like Melicharidae (Mesostigmata).  Myobiids, trombiculids, and ixodids are parasitic, and the others are all likely just phoretic. Who knew the zoo on shrews? Now you do.

Protomyobia nr. claparedei female (note egg).

 

Protomyobia nr. claparedei male (note well-sclerotized aedeagus).

 

Larval Protomyobia nr. claparedei (note styletiform chelicerae).

 

Ventral view of one of the many pygmephorids from the shrew washings.

 

Pygmephorid showing modified legs I.

 

Dorsal view of a shrew chigger (Trombiculidae).

 

Prodorsal shield of a shrew chigger, showing the posterior pair of trichobothria and single anterior median seta (just the base can be seen here) indicative of the family Trombiculidae, as opposed to members of the Leeuwenhoekiidae, which have two anterior median setae.

 

An Oryctoxenus sp. deutonymph (Glycyphagidae). Anterior is pointing up, and yes, it doesn’t have mouthparts.

 

Posterior hair-clasping structures of an Oryctoxenus deutonymph.

 

A larval hard tick (Ixodidae).

 

Retrorse spines on the tick’s hypostome help keep it attached to the host.

 

Maybe a female Proctolaelaps sp.(Melicharidae). Not in great shape.

 

The ‘procto’ part of Proctolaelaps refers to the large anal opening, or so the etymological legend goes.

*Smith, H.C. 1993. Alberta Mammals: an Atlas and Guide. The Provincial Museum of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta.

 

 

Mystery of the Mangy-Squirrel Slurry

A few years ago I worked with members of the Vancouver Rat Project to investigate the cause of lumpy ears in rats from one of the shipping ports in that city. The rodents turned out to have ear mange caused by the sarcoptid mite Notoedris muris (Astigmata: Sarcopidae). As far as we could tell, this was the first record of N. muris in Canada. About two weeks ago, one of the co-authors of this paper, Jamie Rothenburger (now a Doctor of Veterinary Medicine doing her Ph.D. at the University of Guelph in Ontario), emailed to ask if I could look at a chunk of skin taken from a mangy squirrel. Jamie suspected Notoedres centrifera Jansen. This sarcoptid species has been reported to cause mange in many species of sciurids in North America and may be hindering recovery of the western gray squirrel.

Diagnosis and drawings of Notoedres centrifera from Klompen (1992).

Jamie had only histological sections through mangy squirrel skin, though, which are difficult to match to species descriptions. I said sure and soon received a small frozen chunk of integument via courier. The skin sat in a saturated KOH solution for a couple of days to encourage its dissolution. The single mite I managed to find in the smelly skin slurry matched Klompen’s illustrations of N. centrifera (above), and was a similar size (200 um).

Ventral view of the sarcoptid mite I found in the squirrel slurry.

Dorsal view of same.

So, diagnosis confirmed, end of story, right? Well, actually, the mite isn’t the reason for the ‘mystery’ in the title of this post. In addition to the one tiny Notoedres, I found several almost as miniscule (600 um), translucent cigar-shaped objects in the digested squirrel skin. Out of curiosity, I mounted three of them yesterday. [UPDATE: I revisited the slurry and found a fourth critter, images of which are at the bottom of the post]. Today I spent several hours futilely trying to pin them down to a taxon finer than ‘probably some sort of arthropod’. My first thought as I mounted them was follicle mites (Demodicidae) in cysts, but nope, not enough legs. There seem to be only two pairs! Plus they end in single large claws or clawlike tarsi, whereas follicle mites have two small claws per leg. Embryonic insects in eggshells? Still not enough legs, unless the first pair develop much more slowly than the last ones. Maybe…see third photo below. What insects might be on squirrels? The critters don’t look much like lice, because to my knowledge no lice have a big tuft of bum setae. And what are those weird flash-shaped setae at the head end? Are those round things spiracles? And why is there scalloped ornamentation on the bases of the four well-developed legs? None of the many entomology texts I consulted had images at all similar to these.

Ventral view of one of the four-legged embryos (?) from the squirrel skin. Note the long whippy bum setae (I assume that’s the bum end).

Lateral view of one of the other embryos.

It looks like there might be another pair of very poorly sclerotized anterior legs, with the faint leg tips clasping on of the more posterior legs.

Flask shaped setae on the head-ish end.

Something that might be an anterior spiracle.

 

A row of abdominal spiracles?

There’s a fan-shaped structure at the base of each of the sclerotized legs (most clear on second leg from the right). They remind me of the ventromental plates of chironomid larvae.

I managed to mount one of the mystery critters with legs spread out and saw that the fan is actually split, like an open bivalve shell. Note also the trachea.

At the anterior end of the thing are two sets of what look like trichobothrial bases, but there are no trichobothria or other setae coming out of them on any of the four critters that I mounted.

 

I am thoroughly stumped. Help!

Reference:

Klompen J.S.H. 1992. Phylogenetic Relationships in the Mite Family Sarcoptidae (Acari: Astigmata). Museum of Zoology. Ph.D. thesis, The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA.