2y ago

When we go swimming and spend extended time in water, do the little bugs who live on our skin suffocate and die?

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I'm a Demodex folliculorum and I'm currently dating a Demodex brevis so I'm somewhat of an expert. Our host is pretty gross and rarely showers which has made the real estate in this area really expensive. We've been trying to move to another host but the opportunity hasn't come up yet. Anyway, to answer your question, we have scuba gear.
- It's so good to have diverse voices to hear from.
- Thanks for the insight, Greg.
  
  I think this is the dude who stole our lawnmower!!

I wish Lemmy would grow to the point when these Reddit moments of "I'm a dermatologist, and actually...” happen as usual as they happen on Reddit.
- That used to be the case on reddit. These days you have to scroll through hundreds of lame jokes to find an actual discussion.
  
  As far as I notice, puns are an important aspect of English-speaking culture, so I understand that and I'm ok with that. At least for me this "actually..." moment is always worth the scrolling effort :)
- Hey at least we're at the point where people are asking the questions! Literally three days ago nobody needed to summon a dermatologist.
  
  Literally three days ago nobody needed to summon a dermatologist.
  As a nerd with regular cycles of bad skin from dermatitis since my teen years I doubt nobody in a community of nerds needed to summon a dermatologist, but we may soon hit the sweet spot of being big enough to have specific expertise in comments without people lying for clout or karma farming!
  
  I like your attitude!
- Half the time they were lying anyway :(
  
  I am an expert on the little bugs that live on your skin. Swimming for extended periods not only doesn't harm them, it makes them stronger. Try to limit swimming to 2 hours or less or they may become strong enough to take over control of your body!
  
  Only half?
- I’m seeing that, for technology stuff, which is the first step.
- Hey now, we can just lie and pretend to know what we're talking about, just like most on Reddit! 🥳😉
- It will happen one day… hopefully soon
- You will still find these on Quora. They don't even need to say what they are, their subtitle will just say it all
  
  Except they usually won't answer your question, they'll just call you dumb and move on

As another user pointed out, most bacteria and other microscopic forms of life don't really "breath" in the way we think of it. Often they just absorb oxygen from their surrounding environments.
They can be washed away, killed by chlorine (pools), or killed by salt imbalance (ocean). However it's really hard (read near impossible) to kill them all, and even if you did they exist in our environments naturally and from other humans as well as on things we've touched recently. So they repopulate quickly.
There are some arguments that Sodium Laurel Sulfate kills "good" bacteria on our skin.

Now hear me out:
What if you jumped through a tall fire, naked, a few times? Nothing so fast as to actually burn you, but enough to make you hairless.
I'm fairly certain that would kill quite a bit of the microbiome.
- !whywomenlivelonger
  
  Waitaminute. They don't actually shave thier legs?
- Ah, you're a gentleman of logic, I see.
- That's one way to get bald alright

I never realised how much I really want to know the answer to this question.
- Showering does kill mites and bacteria that are all over your body. They’re quite resilient though so you’re never really rid of them.
- Yea, I wanna know if I'm committing genocide every time I shower or not. 😈
  
  Shower, probably. Part of the function of soap (and scrubbing) is to dislodge dirt and bacteria, so it gets washed away.
  So you're either committing genocide by killing them outright, or forcefully relocating them from your body. (also why 99% soap generally doesn't matter too much compared to regular soap)

May I suggest relocating to a warm, soapy box?

Those were the days

I am not a microbiologist. However I do know that bacteria are pretty resilient, and most pathogens and parasites can live for at least a few hours outside of a host. Plus your skin is really not all that smooth at a microscopic level, there are all sorts of little nooks and crannies to hold onto.
Drowning wouldn’t really be a concern for them, imo, but additives like chlorine are specifically meant to be disinfectants.

TIL I have little bugs on my skin :(
- So many!

Actually though. How are the little guys in my eyebrows going? I need to know

I would expect the chlorine in a swimming pool or the salt content on the ocean to be a bigger problem for the microscopic life on our bodies.

Some do other don’t. Bugs/bacterias are resilient.

Nightmare fuel, thanks

I can't say I know the answer, but I do know that one of these bugs -- Tardigrades -- are extremely hard to kill. IIRC one was put into a vacuum and removed after some time. It was either completely fine right away or after a little while.
If I had to give a guess to other things, some of them probably die, yes. Hopefully someone else who knows more will be able to give more information!

And we become a graveyard of little bugs

This is so nasty and interesting at the same time

Here's what Chatgpt/google bard have to say:
The answer is: not necessarily. Most of the bacteria on our skin are adapted to living in wet environments, so they will not suffocate. However, some bacteria may be washed away or killed by the chlorine in the pool.
- Why are we relying on language models to answer questions. These things don’t really “know” anything right?
  
  They don’t, and people are way too blasé about how “oh it’s actually the same as googling because it’s just taking from sources online anyway,” when in reality it does nothing to “keep” the knowledge it gets from those sites and is just stringing together words that often go together. It’s like thinking your phone’s predictive text can answer your questions, if your phone also invented quotes and sources (this has already been an issue with journalists and lawyers using ChatGPT to “research”).
  
  They don't, but they sound as convincing, (and are probably as correct) as a random blog you'd find googling your question
  
  No one knows anything get over yourself buddy - it gave a correct answer way more polite than I ever could so who's gonna complain
  
  Don't they pull from online sources? So it's basically googling with extra steps and an unpredictable middleman
- People are downvoting because of the first line.
  
  Yeah, I’m aware. There were like 10 comments with no replies, so I thought it’d be fun to see what the Chatbot would say. I didn’t take its answer too seriously, but I knew people might be sensitive to the answer. It would have been unfair of me to not say that it was though. Now people can at least decide whether or not to discard the information by providing a “source”.
- Rabbits

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