> Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2001 12:28:48 -0400
> From: Julie Bergman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>
> Dr. Ken Lopez, DVM (and a bunch of other stuff by now!), a fellow gecko
> lister, relayed to me a story about a Tegu that was exposed to a pest strip.
> The outcome was death, if I remember correctly. No pest strips are not the way
> to go. Mineral oil and tape work pretty good and are not toxic. If that does
> not work, then you can get a vet to prescribe some Ivermectin for treatment.
Snake people sometimes use the no-pest strips, and they usually work,
but sometimes they kill the snake or cause permanently neurological
damage. The pesticide in the strips is a "nerve gas" type (organo-
phosphate cholinesterase inhibitor) and pretty toxic. People have
been harmed by sleeping in rooms with no-pest strips.
A new approach is to use some of the many species of mites that eat
or parasitise the ones on the reptile. You can buy them from companies
that sell biocontrol organisms for crops and greenhouses, where they
are used to control mites that damage plants. It's possible that
they can persist in a planted vivarium by living off the mites in
the soil that eat dead organic matter, or they may just die out after
killing all their prey. Some people have reported good results using
this method for arboreal snakes.
Mites are a huge and diverse group of organisms and some of their
life cycles make the most absurd science fiction horror films seem
plausible.
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