Although the ancestral home of chelicerates was the sea, the vast majority of
modern species live on land. Most students of spiders and mites also restrict
themselves to terrestrial habitats. However, a surprising number of mites
(Arachnida: Acari) have returned to a watery existence. Approximately 7000
species from the Mesostigmata, Astigmata, Oribatida, and especially the
Prostigmata, now live in marine and freshwater habitats. In Aquatic Mites, a
dozen chapters explore the distribution, ecology, behavior, genetics, and
evolution of the most diverse of these astonishing arachnids. The results of
these studies raise as many interesting questions as they answer, and should
provoke more investigations of the biology of freshwater and marine Acari.
