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Vol. 38, No. 18
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1-21-2009
By: Adam King Ohio State has built a ‘mitey’ reputation as the preeminent authority on acarology
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Hans Klompen, director of the OSU Acarology Collection, shows off a microscope-enhanced opilioacaridae, a rare spider-like mite with only 15 known species worldwide, including Mexico, India and Brazil. |
If the creatures Hans Klompen studies were the size of humans, they would be the stuff of nightmares.
The humorous side of acarology
It’s fitting that Hans Klompen’s car sports a bumper sticker that reads, “Ticks Suck.”
The director of Ohio State’s Acarology Collection also brings that little bit of levity into his lab.
In fact, Klompen takes great delight in having some fun when new graduate students join his research team or take his three-week summer program, which has welcomed biologists from 44 different countries just in the last 10 years.
He has each of his students do a forehead scraping and then gives them a look under a microscope at the result. Most often they see one or both of two common mites that travel around on humans unbeknownst to their hosts.
“It’s a fantastic thing and everybody is grossed out,” Klompen said. “They all insist, ‘I don’t have those.’ Usually the only way I can get them to do it is by giving them credit in the course, and then I get quite good results.”
Most humans carry around one type of mite, but Klompen found he has two parasites on his body of the three known to favor people.
“Most animals seem to now have more than one species, but humans are really impoverished,” he said. “That’s because most species have hair and most mites cling to hair. Since humans lost their hair, we lost a lot of our mite bugs.”
Asked if hairier humans carry more mites than those less carpeted, Klompen laughed. “No it doesn’t quite work that way. It would be an interesting idea and would be interesting to check up on that. But I really wouldn’t want to do the field sample on that. That’s why I like soil mites.” |
But as many of them are smaller than a pinhead, thankfully the only way they look scary is on a high-definition screen under extreme magnification. Klompen is an associate professor of entomology and director of Ohio State’s Acarology Collection — one of the largest university collections of known ticks and mites and one of the most diverse anywhere in the world.
The collection is housed in a single room at the Museum of Biological Diversity at 1315 Kinnear Road and is quite nondescript compared to the other collections that reside there, such as the 3.5-million specimen insect collection or the zoology assortment, which has been collected since 1874 and is now stored warehouse-style. But one doesn’t need a lot of space for ticks and mites, even with more than 120,000 slides and 15,000 fluid lots (which can contain up to 10,000 specimens per lot) on hand.
Beyond the collection’s size, what’s astounding about it is the rapidity in which it grows. Klompen said the collection receives between 1,000 and 3,000 usable specimens every year. There also is a backlog of thousands of mites to be sorted, “if ever,” Klompen said.
“It’s not a huge collection by the standards of insect collections,” he added, “but it’s pretty good for a mite collection.”
The majority of research into ticks and mites involves how to deal with the medical, economic or agricultural problems they create, which can be extensive: Think tick-borne Lyme disease. But they also are key components of our planet’s ecology.
“These little things really run the world,” said John Wenzel, director of the Museum of Biological Diversity. “Lions and tigers are fairly irrelevant. The soil that grows the plants the deer eats, that’s arthropod more than anything else. If you would sweep away all these arthropods, the terrestrial world you know would not function and would basically cease to exist within a few seasons. But if you swept away all the birds and mammals, the forest would still operate, the prairie would still be what it is.”
There are around 60,000 known species of mites, but there likely are more than a million more species that have yet to be defined. “If you go to the tropics, if you find anything that is not new, that’s pretty exciting,” Klompen said. “Pretty well everything at the species level is going to be new.
“Mites are easy to find, and that’s the scary part. You take a trap of insects, say millipedes, and you catch 20 or something. You then take a soil sample and extract mites. Well, start sorting the first thousand or so. It takes forever just to even sort them and that’s just one sample, which is not enough. You have to do 50 or 100.”
It takes patience, which Klompen seems to have in ample volumes, as well as dedicated graduate students. Monica Farfan works with millipede mites and Kaitlin Uppstrom specializes in ant mites.
Just the history of mites and ticks, which stretches back 376 million years to the Devonian Age, and their vast unknowns tend to scare potential researchers away from the field. Klompen was a snake ecologist in the Netherlands when he decided his well-studied path wouldn’t lead to many new advances.
“But there was one weird guy in the Netherlands who was working on mites, and he had one great advantage over everybody else,” Klompen said. “He was sending his students abroad on occasion, and I wanted to go somewhere. He got me hooked and it was the only way I would have gotten to the US.”
Since then Klompen has been on expeditions to Brazil, American Samoa, Australia, Mexico, Belize, the Republic of Georgia and French Guyana.
Klompen’s dedication, and the fact Ohio State had gotten involved in acarology long before others in 1961, is the reason the university is considered internationally preeminent in the field, said Museum of Biological Diversity Director John Wenzel.
“Pretty much every acarologist traces his or her lineage to Columbus, Ohio, one way or another,” Wenzel said. “There are a lot of places where people study acarology, like the Smithsonian or the Paris Museum, but OSU’s domination is pretty complete after 50 years.”
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