CLOSED: Yikes! Get 'em off my plant!! =(

Somebody help me! I've got horrid tiny little thingies all over my plant! =/

I woke up this morning, much, much earlier than I normally do, and went outside to check on my plants. I was mystified to find that one of them, the one I'm giving most of my attention to, was covered in tiny little critters!! There were none on the plant or foliage anywhere at all, just on the soil, and only around the edges of the pot, nothing near the center at all. Also, I have several dozen plants, some directly adjacent to that pot, but there aren't any in any other pot, just this one. I have no idea what they are or why they're in my pot, but I want 'em out! =P

As you can see from the photo (ignore the big fella, I think he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time! =P), they are microscopic things, whitish in color, and there are literally thousands if not tens of thousands of them in this one pot. The photo was taken with a 5MP camera on supermacro, and the big guy is a common household earwig, for size comparison. The little critters really are literally about the size of dust. If they hadn't been so prolific, and bouncing around everywhere like bedbugs in a cartoon, I wouldn't have even seen them with the naked eye at all.

So, my questions three:-

1) What on Earth are they??
2) Are they harmful to my plants?
3) How do I get rid of them?

Any help or advice would be great - this particular plant is a real pet project of mine, and I don't want to see it devoured by a zillion hungry bedbugs! =(

It's really rather hard to get the full impression of these critters from a still photo, even at high-res on supermacro, so I took a little video footage too. It's about 8MB, so dialup users (if there are any still out there! =P) may not want to click this, but otherwise, it really does give a much better idea of what I'm dealing with here. Note how they seem to crawl up the side of the pot, and are also bouncing around by the thousands, and also how there are fewer, almost none, towards the center of the pot, where the plant is, out of shot to the right.

Please check it out at http://52k.net/stuff/MVI_1312.AVI and let me know what you think!

Thanks guys,

I think they are springtails. I've only ever seen them in the snow, but when you said they jump around, that confirmed my guess, to me anyway.. . I couldn't get your video to play.

From what I can find, they're harmless

Okay claypa, thanks for your feedback.

Can anybody else support/verify this at all? Particularly somebody who is able to view the video? It's just an XVid MPEG4 encoded AVI, so most up-to-date media players should be able to view it, or at least automatically download the required codec to do so.

If they are Springtails, then I guess I'm no so concerned, but I wouldn't mind a backup/second opinion if anybody else has any thoughts also?

Thanks again guys.

They look like earwigs. And they'll eat your plants.

Vaelor knows about the earwig in the picture, and is asking about the other, tiny, whitish insects that are there

I realized after my response that I didn't read the entire question. The white insects look like scale.

Claypa is correct. They are springtails and are harmless. Here is some more info on them.
http://www.whatsthatbug.com/springtails.html

Could it be onion thrips???

The sheer number of them ("literally thousands if not tens of thousands of them in this one pot"), the fact that they are "bouncing around everywhere like bedbugs in a cartoon" and "There were none on the plant or foliage anywhere at all, just on the soil" would rule out thrips or scale.

I found them this morning also. Boy was I freaked out. Thanks for telling me what they are. I found a really good site that says they show that you have healthy soil. That is nice. It's nice to know that a little bug came in my life to tell me I am doing something right. http://www.paghat.com/springtails.html

You guys are fantastic. Thanks to all your posts, and in particularly the two website sources posted, I'm now convinced that these are indeed Springtails, and am very glad to hear they're not harmful to my plant. I keep that pot in particular very well watered, and it was quite a chill morning, so the factors all concur.

I'll mark this as solved now, but please stay tuned in this forum because I have discovered two more strange types of bugs I'd like to identify, since my Springtail invasion, so put your investigators hats on! =D

Thanks again!