Like any other pets, bearded dragons are prone to health challenges including mites.
Those instances can be stressful and knowing what to do in such a case to treat blood mites in beardies is important.
What are blood mites in bearded dragons?
A blood mite is a blood-sucking parasite. They are most commonly found on snakes, but also occurring on captive lizards such as bearded dragons, turtles, crocodiles, and other reptiles.
They are small and settle between the scales of your bearded dragon. They feed of your pet’s blood.
In general they are red in color but sometimes can be grey.
If you don’t do anything about mites, they will multiply quickly with all the consequences that entails.
They can also be on the eyelids and in the ears of your bearded dragon.
It is therefore important to treat mites as soon as you see some in order to avoid further health complication for your beardie.
How do bearded dragons get mites?
It’s worth noting that your bearded dragon may also get mites from contaminated pets’ food.
Or maybe you’ve held a bearded dragon that already had red mite?
Then you can also take it with you through your clothes.
Therefore always wash your hands after holding a bearded dragon.
How to treat red mite
This can be done in several ways. If you see a few spots of blood mites, you can still combat it in a natural way.
This is possible with other forms of mites. These are predatory mites of 1 mm in size that hunt and eat the red mites. They are released in a certain way in your beardie’s terrarium and therefore on the sand.
These predatory mites just need a different temperature than your bearded dragon. Between 15 and 28 degrees because otherwise they do nothing.
Outside those temperatures they rest and then the mites can become more active again. But it is a natural mite control.
However, if you already have a larger infection, you unfortunately have to do a little more.
Empty your terrarium. You must also keep repeating this until your animal has no more blood mites. This applies to all types of treatments you do against mites.
If your bearded dragon has more mites and the terrarium is empty and clean, you can try the following:
Lubricate your bearded dragon with sunflower oil or olive oil.
Don’t forget to smear all the folds but don’t smear the eyes and ears!
Mites need oxygen and they don’t get that if your animal is in the oil.
Then the mites fall off, but some may still be alive.
But because you clean your terrarium every day, it thins out a lot.
Lubricate your bearded dragon every day with sunflower oil or olive oil.
Keep repeating this and you don’t see any blood mites anymore.
This is of course also labor-intensive and you may not have the time for it.
Then some specialty stores [1] also sell “mite off” against red mites.
Always read the user manual carefully before using them.
Additional Resources
[1] Reptiles specialty stores
https://www.petsmart.ca/reptile/
My name is Brad and I am the main editor of BeardieZilla.com.
The only goal of this site is quite simply to be able to help you. To help you by the means of my experiment, of the relation which I maintain with my bearded dragon as well as some of my knowledge about beardies.
I hope that you will find answers to some of your most pressing questions here.
Thank you for stopping by and enjoy the blog!
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