Mite identification please

YessicaHaircut

I will spare you the stream of consciousness ramblings from my original thread, but on the advice of @Pete.8 I'm posting a new thread to see if anyone can help with identification.

Briefly, I have a heavy infestation of the little fellas in the pic below in some bags of MPC. 



I also have evidence of webbing on indoor plants and seedlings, between empty trays of compost, and maybe some outdoor ones (could just be spider webbing for the outdoor ones). I also have some damage to honesty seedlings that from googling seems to be consistent with spider mite - would you agree?



I haven't seen any mites on plants themselves, only in and around the compost.

Are the mites in the picture spider mites? Can they live in compost? The honesty is planted in compost that predated the bags with the mite infestation. Are the mites in the compost soil mites and I coincidentally have spider mites wreaking their damage too? I'd really appreciate any light that can be shed.

BobTheGardener

Those do look like soil aka compost mites:

https://www.sciencephoto.com/media/938536/view/mites-and-springtail-in-compost

They feed on dead plant material and not living plants and are probably in all compost, to a greater or lesser degree.

https://www.ukhouseplants.com/pests/soil-mites

The plants could well be suffering from spider-mites, which do cause that kind of damage.

YessicaHaircut

Thanks, Bob. I think it could be consistent with both soil mite and spider mite pictures I've seen. My husband has kindly offered to take a look under a microscope a little later as I can't face it. It's sounding like I might have a double dose of mites though.