Unlike mosquitoes, ticks, and other biting bugs, chiggers don’t burrow into your skin to suck blood, though that’s a common misconception.
“They actually bite at the hair follicle,” says Elmer Gray, PhD, an entomologist at the University of Georgia in Athens, who’s based in Arnoldsville, Georgia.
The tiny mites pierce the skin with their sharp mouthparts and inject a digestive enzyme that helps them break down and digest skin cells for food.
Because their bite “can cause some swelling around the bite site, that makes it look like the chigger has burrowed into the skin,” he says.
This swelling may appear as redness or discoloration, clear pustules, or bumps. The bumps may resemble small pimples or hives.
How to Tell Chigger Bites From Other Bug Bites
“It’s nearly impossible to differentiate between different types of insect or arthropod bites,” Dr. Gray says.
Especially if you’re bitten by a lone chigger, the red welt that forms may look more or less identical to a mosquito bite.
Unlike a mosquito bite, though, a chigger bite probably won’t be noticed right away — it can take a few hours or more for it to start itching.
And as with all bug bites, reactions to chigger bites may differ among different people, says Jonathan Larson, PhD, an assistant professor of extension entomology at the University of Kentucky, which is located in Lexington.
“People can become sensitized to bites and start to react more; some people always have the same reaction, others may never react at all,” he says.
That said, chiggers tend to latch onto a person’s skin in groups, as opposed to a single mosquito bite. As a result, the bites often appear as a line or cluster of red welts.
They also tend to be intensely itchy, which might give you another clue about which type of bug bit you. And the location of your bites can give you a hint about whether they’re from chiggers.