Welcome to the Blue Jay Blog Shed mini-post “Your Life is Worse When You Know About Dust Mites.” Brace yourself as your knowledge takes a slightly darker turn after reading this.

Let’s start by talking about dust:

Typically, when thinking about dust in a room, you might say, “Oh, there’s a bit of dust in that corner and perhaps some on that shelf up there.” However, occasionally, when a beam of light hits at a specific angle, you realize that the entire room is engulfed in dust, and you’re essentially living in a dust swarm constantly. These moments can be a bit unsettling, but most people just shrug it off and move on.

But, if you delve deeper and contemplate it further, things take a disturbing turn. Here are a couple of issues that might bother you:

1) Dust primarily consists of dead skin flakes. It’s quite unpleasant for dust to be made up of such a repulsive component.

2) Dust is teeming with minuscule tick-like creatures known as dust mites. A dust mite, when viewed through a microscope, is definitely not a friendly sight:

• They are extremely tiny, about a quarter of a millimeter in size, and are translucent, making them almost impossible to see with the naked eye.

• These creatures survive on your shed dead skin flakes, which are scattered all over your bed, especially if you’re not diligent about cleanliness.

• There could be around 100-500 mites in a typical gram of dust and up to a staggering 100,000 mites in a square meter of carpet.

• Their preferred habitat is your mattress, with an estimated two million mites crawling around in an average mattress.

• Even more preferred by them is your pillow. An average pillow could be a home to approximately 40,000 mites. According to mite specialist John Maunder, if you’ve been using a six-year-old pillow, around one-tenth of its weight would consist of dead human skin, living mites, dead mites, and mite excrement.

• When individuals are allergic to dust, they are essentially allergic to mite excrement, particularly a digestive enzyme found abundantly in it. A female mite has a lifespan of about 10 weeks, during which she lays 60-100 eggs, defecates around 2,000 times, and leaves more than 2,000 dust particles with her waste before she dies—the same particles you see swirling in that beam of light in your home.

So, that’s what you can ponder as you crawl into bed tonight. And the next time your child worries about a monster hiding under the bed, you can reassure them by explaining that there are actually two million monsters residing in your bed and possibly show them a picture of a mite.