Harvest-mites. A score or more of different varieties of mites cause many other diseases of domestic animals, such as the scab of sheep and hogs and chickens, various other manges of the horses and cattle and dogs, etc. But we need to call attention to just one more example, that of the harvest-mites or jiggers ([Fig. 21]). Professor Otto Lugger, from whose report on the Parasites of Man and Domestic Animals most of these notes in regard to the mites are taken, thus feelingly refers to this pest.
"About the very worst pests of man and domesticated animals are the Harvest-bugs, Red-bugs or Jiggers.... Men and animals passing through low herbage that harbors them are attacked by these pests, which, whenever they succeed in finding a host, burrow in and under the skin, causing intolerable itching and sores, the latter caused by the feverish activity of the finger-nails of the host, if that should be a man, whose energy in scratching, apparently, cannot be controlled and who is bound forcibly to remove the intruders. The writer has been there! Those who have ever passed through meadows infested with red-bugs will remember the occasion."
Horses, cattle, dogs and cats and other animals suffer also. Again sulphur ointments are the best remedies.
"The normal food of these mites must, apparently, consist of the juices of plants, and the love of blood proves ruinous to those individuals which get a chance to indulge it. For, unlike the true chigoe, the female of which deposits eggs in the wound she makes, these harvest-mites have no object of the kind, and when not killed at the hands of those they torment they soon die victims to their sanguinary appetite."
CHAPTER IV
HOW INSECTS CAUSE OR CARRY DISEASE
t has been estimated that there are about four thousand species or kinds of Protozoans, about twenty-five thousand species of Mollusks, about ten thousand species of birds, about three thousand five hundred species of mammals, and from two hundred thousand to one million species of insects, or from two to five times as many kinds of insects as all other animals combined.