Mites riding on bark beetles: the Elattoma species Khaustov described in 2000
In 2000 an acarologist in Yalta described four new species of Elattoma, minute mites that live in bark-beetle galleries and travel on the beetles. The species came from Crimea and North-West Russia, and the English Wikipedia article on Crimea cites the paper as a source on these mites and their beetle hosts.
What the study did and found
The paper is “Mites of the Genus Elattoma (Acariformes, Pygmephoridae) from Crimea and North-West Russia”, published in Russian with an English abstract in Vestnik Zoologii in 2000. Khaustov, of the State Nikita Botanical Garden in Yalta, studied mites collected with bark beetles in Crimea and the Leningrad region in 1996–1997. The Cabdirect number begins with 2002, the year the paper was indexed, not the year it appeared.
He found five Elattoma species among 59 female mites carried by eight beetle species under the bark of spruce, pine, oak, beech and ash. Four were new to science, E. lata, E. kornilovi, E. crossi and E. fraxini, and the paper states that these mites live in beetle galleries and ride on the beetles, apparently feeding on fungi (Khaustov, 2000).
Why it is cited
The main referring page recorded here is the English Wikipedia article “Crimea”, where the paper’s title is the link text for a sentence saying that bark beetles are pests of tree crops and hosts for Elattoma mites that transmit insect-killing fungi.
That use only partly matches the paper, which supports mites riding bark beetles but says nothing about insect-killing fungi, and whose beetles came from forest trees, not tree crops.
The paper is descriptive taxonomy based only on females; E. fraxini was described from a single specimen and E. crossi from two, and the fungus diet was presumed rather than observed (Khaustov, 2000).
A 2011 world key treats all four species as valid (Rahiminejad et al., 2011), and E. fraxini turned up on elm bark beetles but rarely carried Dutch elm disease spores (Moser et al., 2010).
The topic today
Elattoma keeps appearing in bark beetle surveys, with a first record for Romania in 2025 (Toma et al., 2025). Infested spruce in five Central European countries fell to about 11.5 million m³ in 2025 from 21 million m³ in 2024 (Forestry and Game Management Research Institute, 2026).
For the current picture, see our explainer Mites That Ride Bark Beetles: Four Species Described in 2000.