I’ve been leaving an open, clean milk jug full of water to let some RO water dechlorinate near the plants and noticed a cluster of mites dead in the water. I also happened to watch an informative video about bed bugs earlier in the day and learned that bed bugs are attracted to vertical objects! That got me wondering if it’s true for plant-eating mites as well, so here’s a little experiment.
Research: Bed bugs are attracted to vertical objects and are parasitic. Mites can be parasitic to plants, and plants are vertical.
Hypothesis: Mites that eat plants are attracted to vertical objects.
Methods: I took the RO water milk jug and placed between my plants and the corner of the wall where mites were the most abundant to the naked eye. The jug alone is about an inch shorter than the potted plant, so it makes a good vertical surface replacement. I left the jug there over night.
Results: A ton of mites are on and in the the jug this morning and I don’t see quite as many on the plants.
Conclusion & Discussion: Obviously this is a pretty crappy experiment, but it does seem that the mites were at least distracted by the vertical object in their path.I kind of hoped that they’d crawl into the jug and die in the water like before but a lot of them don’t seem to care. The number floating dead in the water has almost quintupled. Holy dang.