mites?

[Chelipepper]

today i was cleaning cages and didnt notice anything amiss .. gave everyone the usual skritches and hugs , etc .. no one has any skin spots or scabs, no exessive itching ..

as i was reading about 10 mins later, i got that strange 'somethings crawling on me' feeling and looked at my arm ..and there WAS something crawling on me .. a tiny little dark bug .. then i looked at my shirt front where i hold my ratties and i had a patch of them there ..yikes! i sprayed them with hairspray so i could kill them and look at them but they are so tiny, i cant really see them anyway ..

they appeared to be darkish and when i sprayed them were a darker reddish color .. are they mites? whats the best way of dealing with them if they are - ive heard its best to give the ratties Ivermectrin ..sigh .. happy new year

 

[Maple]

Your ratties have lice. Do you use a wood/woodbased bedding or have you recently purchased wood chew toys or houses? They also come in with fluff bedding and seed mix foods. You have to go back approximately 30 days and look at what you have purchased to narrow down your lice source. Lice are much easier to get rid of then mites.
Good luck and don't panic. They really are no big deal just creepy.

 

[Chelipepper]

yesssss ... we just bought a huge bag of aspen bedding about 3 wks ago and i bet thats the culprit .. im going to toss it tommorow and see if i can get ahold of some Ivermectrin ..it is bigtime creepy anic:

 

[pscychopomp]

I've seen advice to freeze things for a few days before using, so maybe you don't have to chuck it...

 

[Maple]

Don't toss it, put it in the deep freezer. I deep freeze EVERYTHING I purchase for all my rodents in the deep freezer for at least 72 hours as this will kill them off no problem. Aspen seems to be the "home" of choice for these bugs. Go to a feed store and purchase Ivermectin which is a horse paste in a syringe. Its quite cheap and works well. Give each rattie a piece the size of a grain of rice and make sure you clean out the cage on a very regular basis. You should do this 3 times (Ivermectin treatment once per week). You will be able to see the dead lice in the bottom of the cage as they start to "bite the big one". Another option is to use revolution which you can purchase on line or get from your vet.
Good luck.

 

[Chelipepper]

i should just put the aspen outside my back door lol..we are at 17 degrees here now as it is ..well, i was thinking i didnt really like the aspen anyway .. i went to ebay and bought a tube of Ivermectin just before i posted this reply =P ... i feel so bad knowing that as i was cleaning them tonight i was probably giving them more bugs ..yuck ..

 

[Maple]

I believe a deep/chest freezer is in the -5F to -10F range so 17 won't be cold enough. Not 100% sure as I'm not a "freezer" expert. :giggle: but I do believe it should be colder than 17F.

 

[Moon]

Don't feel bad, almost everyone gets mites or lice at some point in their colonies.

 

[pscychopomp]

I guess that's what my rats had about 10 years ago, I thought they were mites since human lice are white (these were reddish brown). We had a litter of babies and because of their short fur I noticed them easily (they were under the 2 week mark). I plucked them all off with tweezers and put them on an open light bulb to kill them, then the vet told us to just use flea spray for cats...I wiped them all down with cotton balls soaked with it. Seems that wasn't the best advice, but at least it worked and no one got sick from the spray.

 

[Chelipepper]

well got the agri-mectin in the mail today ..tommorow is cage cleaning day and time to toss out any wooden and or cloth things they have and time to dose! yay! ...not :shock:

thanks for all the suggestions and most of all the moral support :hugs:

 

[Maple]

Moral support is always here on the shack. Moon pretty much hit it on the head.

Don't feel bad, almost everyone gets mites or lice at some point in their colonies.