Biology Forum Zoology Discussion What is that in my cellar?

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    • #8105
      Mr. Moe
      Participant

      [here is a short story how i found these "things", if your time is short and expensive, scroll to the bottom of this post, have a look at the pictures and if you know what it is, please tell me]

      Its friday, earlly evening.
      I sit in front of the TV with a beer on the table, ready to start 2 weeks without parents 😉 (they went away for holiday).
      A short look at the bottle made me wonder where all that strange white dust came from, which was partly on the bottle…
      while watsching TV i noticed that the dust was actually moving…
      "What The…?!" was the first thing that came to mind.

      I checked the beer crate out of which i had my bottle and it was full with these things!
      size: about a half millimeter (rather less)
      colour: light grey to white

      next to it was a little bag of mouldy potatos i threw away in an instant, but that wanst all. the grandmother of my sisters boyfriend has an old fashioned stable with chickens, pigs… and so on.
      my mother thought it would be a great idea to store old bread for hear in a container you’d normaly put your dirty clothes in (old soup + old bread is what her piggies like). result: bread mouldy as well, and the box it was in had plenty of these "invaders" on its surface.
      (but i think theire main "power source" were the potatos, when i lifted those, white dust literally rained down).

      since i spotted these things, they havent spread. but there are still many of these at places they were on friday.

      and now i’m sitting here, trying to figure out, what these things are.
      luckily my father had an old microscope. its light is broken, so i illuminated the "sampels" with an blue LED flashlight (which gave those pictures a pretty cool touch :D).
      (both pictures are from the same entity, i just varied the lighting)
      (it’s kinda tough to shoot pictures with a regular digital camera through the lense of a microscope, but if you need more shots, just shout)

      now its time to lift the curtain for my little invaders!:

      code :http://www.in.fh-merseburg.de/~rradesto/MonsterHouse/UnknownSpecies01-1.jpg

      http://www.in.fh-merseburg.de/~rradesto/MonsterHouse/UnknownSpecies01-2.jpg

      (because this is my first post, i can’t include those pictures into the post directly :/ (bot protection?))

      p.s.: i’m no biologist at all. so i’m not sure if this is the right spot to post my problem. also english is not my mother tounge,
      so please have pity on me 😉

      [edit]

      i just wanted to mention that the bread has been banished out of the house. also my preciuos beer crates were cleaned via garden hose.
      but as soon as i put them back to their old place, those nasty little things started to crawl over the bottles again. looks like we are not the only ones who like beer 😉
      the floor has also been wiped.

      i dont want to fire my bio-chemical weapons as long as i don’t know who my enemy is 😉

    • #75275
      mith
      Participant

      Wow, that stuff looks scary..

    • #75278
      Mr. Moe
      Participant
      quote mith:

      Wow, that stuff looks scary..

      after hours of searching the internet, i came to the same conclusion 😉

      the most applicable thing i found so far is, that this thing might be a:
      Psocoptera (a.k.a. booklice or barklice)

      but i think even the smallest of their kind seems to be to big.

      any other suggestions?

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