Yuck discovered hay mite hangout :(

[PigglePuggle]

So after giving all my piggies a first dose of Xeno 450 and dismantling the cage and F10 blitzing it and hot washing all my fleecy stuff and throwing away all the edible furniture and chucking out the hay... I think I know where the evil hay mites have come from!
We have a big fabric ottoman style storage box I used to keep hay in and still keep a few piggy things in and I was rummaging for a clean sleeping bag to catch the piggies in after playpen time... when I saw something moving. Dug a little deeper in the box... argh yuck lots of tiny tiny crawly things living in the bits of hay and piggy fur hidden in the bottom of the storage box! Banished the box and its contents to the back yard to freeze overnight. Gonna throw everything out except plastic stuff I will disinfect with F10 tomorrow and fleecy stuff I'll hot wash. The hay bits must date back to the start of summer when we bought pets at home hay and it was in there a while as we only had 2 small piggies in a small cage then... kicking myself I didnt think of that earlier! Think I can freeze it in the yard in the cold weather then do an extreme vacuum clean on it and it will be ok? Or do I throw it out? Can hay/fur mites survive without hay and fur? Could they be in my carpets and stuff? I'm freaking out expecting every speck of dust to start moving now... piggy daddy is freaking out too, he saw a spider in the bathroom (he loves spiders usually) and started shrieking it was a mite... we had to google photos of them so I could explain they are microscopically small and look like crawly dandruff and dont look like spiders...

 

[PigglePuggle]

I caught some with sellotape and will get them under the microscope tomorrow at work but they looked like crawling elongated dark specks... Chirodiscoides I presume? I read that you couldnt see them just them eggs but they were moving over everything... It looked like some kind of evil animated nano-dust like in a sci-fi story hope the Xeno 450 and a very thorough clean of everywhere I keep piggy things will blast them all to hell!

 

[Betsy]

At least you know where they are coiming from. Hopefully a night outside will kill the little blighters in the box. F10 is good stuff. It kills practically everything. When Dennis had mites, I did a thorough deep clean of the hutch. I may have gone a bit overboard with the old F10 though using up 500 ml of it.

 

[Bill & Ted]

Can someone tell me we’re you get F10 from and what you can use it for? My piggies don’t have mites but it would be good to keep some just in case. They are bedded on hay most of the time, except playpen which has fleece.

 

[Merab]

Hope you manage to clear all those nasty mites up.
It’s good that you found the source.
Go blast them all!

 

[Wiebke]

I caught some with sellotape and will get them under the microscope tomorrow at work but they looked like crawling elongated dark specks... Chirodiscoides I presume? I read that you couldnt see them just them eggs but they were moving over everything... It looked like some kind of evil animated nano-dust like in a sci-fi story hope the Xeno 450 and a very thorough clean of everywhere I keep piggy things will blast them all to hell!

Hi! Just disinfect. And no, they are not hay mites. Any mites (both mange and hay mites) themselves are near invisible and the dark little bits you can see are the static egg cases which are fixed to their hairs at the bum end; egg cases don't walk around. Lice are generally pale, ranging from white through yellowish to a reddish tone.

Whatever they ar, they do not sound like guinea pig specific skin parasites, but may have well come with the hay.

Just disinfect the box and contents thoroughly and throw away what you no longer need, but don't panic, please!
What to check and look out for in new guinea pigs (vet checks, sexing, parasites&illness)