This blog post was written by Adriann Negreros, an undergraduate researcher in the Dutton lab at Harvard. 

We work in a cheese lab, so it’s no surprise to learn that we all love to eat—and to have fun.  Yes, we do have our 9-5’s, but the daily grind in the Dutton lab just isn’t all that troublesome (clearly, we need to work more).  Jokes aside, when we’re not dissecting a fresh rind of Bayley Hazen Blue into 1 mm x 1 mm squares (to discover just “who” is living there), or slowly uncovering a new species via our cheeses—we’re playing with mites.  Yes, mites; those seemingly scary eight-legged little critters capable of growing on cheese.