Cues eliciting attachment/detachment behaviors of mites phoretic on Ips spp

When bark beetles colonize and kill pine trees, they convert a previously unavailable habitat into a resource accessible to a wide diversity of organisms, including mites phoretic on the beetles. The food resource available to mites within this habitat may consist of beetle eggs, other beetle symbionts, or detritus. However, this resource is ephemeral in space and time and and mites must transport themselves to fresh habitats via phoretic interactions. Few studies have examined the cues that trigger the behavioral and morphological changes by which mites detach from hosts once carried into a dying pine, or conversely attach to emerging insects in order to resume phoresy.  Many studies of phoretic mite communities associated with a single beetle species have been published. These beetle-centric studies fail to capture that mite movements within a given system may take place via many hosts. It has long been known that mites may vary from specialist to generalist in their phoretic behavior, however more studies must be designed to describe this variation. We present the results of mite communities collected from complexes of pine-associated beetles trapped in Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin.