There are 1.5 million mites that have sex on your face every night

I was catching up on Brooklyn Nine Nine and one of the characters mentioned humans have millions of mites living in their eyebrows, nose, and hair line. I thought it was an embellishment or completely fabricated, but apparently it's true.

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Right now, there are thousands of mites on your face. They're microscopic, but closely related to spiders and ticks. And despite your reaction to hearing this news, there's absolutely nothing wrong with you.

"99.9 percent of humans carry them," says Ron Ochoa, a mite scientist at the US Department of Agriculture. They're most abundant on our faces, but live in the hair follicles all over our bodies, and a single person may harbor more than one million of them in total.

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During the day, the animals stay hidden in your follicles, feeding on oils naturally secreted by your glands. At night, they use their stubby legs to climb to the surface to find mates.

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Your body harbors at least two closely-related species of mites: Demodex folliculorum and Demodex brevis. Both live in your hair follicles, but folliculorum live in the follicles' main cavity, whereas the smaller brevis live in something called the sebaceous gland, which secretes a waxy oil called sebum — likely the mites' main food source.

Both types of Demodex are densest on the face — especially near the nose, eyebrows, eyelashes, and hairline — but they live anywhere on your body where hair follices are. Scientists, however, have never fully studied the total abundance of mites on the human body. Dan Fergus, a researcher that works with Menninger, estimates that the average person has between 1.5 and 2.5 million mites, but no one really knows.

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Nearly all adults carry these mites, but children usually don't — and only about 70 percent of 18-year-olds do. It's still unclear how we initially pick them up. Many scientists believe we somehow acquire them from our parents — Ochoa thinks they first latch on to us when we breastfeed as babies — while others hypothesize that we acquire them from sexual partners.

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"We joke that the mites come out to party, because they have sex on your face at night," Menninger says. During the day, they return to the follicles, where females lay eggs.

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