As humans, we believe we own our bodies solely but when we decide to go into the reality of things, we aren't the only ones that own our bodies. Some organisms have made our bodies home to themselves and although some can cause problems for us, a lot don't even bother us at all.
When you wake up in the morning, you wash your face, wipe it off add ointments. Some people even go a long way to use different facials on their face just so they can have good-looking faces but do you know that the house face also houses an organism? It goes with the genus Demodex and is called the Skin mite. There are over 60 species known, and they love near or in the follicles of mammals with two species known to live on the face, skin, or lashes of humans which is why they are given the name face mite, or lash mite, or skin mite. They live their lives inside your hair follicles, feeding on the oil secreted by your skin.
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The human cell is made up of 44% own while the rest is that of other organisms. What makes up you is complex and aside from non-living things, the living organisms that are part of your makeup include fungi, arthropods, worms, and bacteria. Of all of these organisms, bacteria seem to be ubiquitous as they can be found almost everywhere in the body. In the gut, bacteria help us break down complex carbohydrates that we cannot break down, when they are done breaking it down, they release simple sugars that we can use up.
Fungi are another group of organisms living on your body. We all have fungus growing on our bodies at any point in time. On your body, you can find Candida, trichosporon, and inside the body in the throat is Aspergillus. But talking about higher organisms which are microscopic, we have the human itch mite which digs deep into our skin.
Other organisms like the hook work is attached to our intestines but they start to burrow into our body from the feet to the bloodstream which transports them to the lungs where they go through the throat to get to the mouth where they are probably swallowed helping them to find their way to the intestinal walls where they hook themselves to. They lay eggs when the time is right and you release them via feces after which they hatch and the process begins again.
The next time you look at yourself, just have it at heart that you are made up of a lot of things both living and non-living, and when it comes to living things, you are made up of different species that have found a home in your body.
READ MORE
- https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2012/06/13/154913334/finally-a-map-of-all-the-microbes-on-your-body
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK7617/
- https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/22775-demodex-face-mites
- https://consensus.app/home/blog/the-consensus-our-bodies-contain-more-bacteria
- https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/articles/24494-bacteria