These guys copulate on your face and live on it at all times?

[theking]

A scientist scraped a black dot on his forehead and filmed it under a microscope, revealing dozens of crawling face mites


They come out at night to have sex on your face. They feast on the oil in your pores. They lay eggs in your sebaceous glands. Yikes!

They sound like something from a horror film, but these mysterious, microscopic creatures are very real.

They're called Demodex mites and they live on all mammals. If you haven't heard of them, you're not alone.

These mites are so small that most people have no idea they exist. At about 0.15 to 0.4 millimeters long, it would take several mites to cover the head of a pin.

They live their entire lives on your body and eventually die and decompose all within the pores of your face. Sound like a fun time?

Here's a closer look at what these mites look like.

Demodex mites in action
Recent video footage from scientist, James Weiss, the videographer for the YouTube channel Journey to the Microcomos and author of "The Hidden Beauty of the Microscopic World," shows these mites in action, the way they move and their eight tiny legs wiggling around on our skin.

Microscopic image of a face mite.
Here you can see the two distinct halves of the Demodex's body — at one end, the eight legs near the mouth and the other longer, slimmer end consisting of their gastrointestin al organs and genitals.James Weiss/Journey to the Microscomsos.
German dermatologist Gustav Simon first discovered Demodex in 1842.

Nearly 200 years later, scientists still aren't entirely sure why these mysterious mites exist and live on mammals — except to say we've simply evolved together over time, said Michelle Trautwein, an entomologist who studies Demodex and other anthropods and insects at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco.

"They're not just on us; they're on all mammals. So they evolved initially on early mammals and they've speciated as mammals have speciated," Trautwein told Insider.

Two Demodex mites side by side.James Weiss/Journey to the Microscomsos.
The fascinating footage and images of these mites featured in the YouTube video came from James Weiss' own face.