About Chiggers

Have you ever spent a lovely day outdoors, sitting on rocks, dangling your feet in a stream or sprawled in a grassy field? Those kinds of days are great memories unless when you get home you find yourself covered with raised red bumps that itch badly. Probably the problem is chiggers.

Identification

• Chiggers are in the family of arachnids and the order of acarinas, along with spiders and scorpions. Chiggers go by four names. Their scientific name is trombicula irritans. People call them "true chiggers," "red bugs" and "jiggers".

Features

• Chiggers are invertebrates with four pairs of legs. They have fuzzy but unsegmented oval bodies. Most of them are red or reddish brown, if you can even see them. Chiggers reproduce by laying eggs.

Size

• The largest of the acarina order's 1,500 species is a half-inch long. The smallest are too small to see. These are little enough to crawl between the fibers in clothing so that they can hold on and feed on human blood.

Function

• Chiggers are parasites that rely on blood from a host for food, and humans make for delicious hosts. They don't burrow beneath the skin. Rather, they attach themselves to the host.

Geography

• Chiggers range from Central Mexico to Canada. They prefer fields that are filled with grass or weeds. There is a species of chigger in the Pacific Islands and in Eastern Asia that is a vector for Japanese River Fever. This makes their bite much more serious than the typical itching we tend to have.