الفهرس 
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Abstract
INTRODUCTION
Acarines may be found in virtually any environment including severe desert tundra situations, mountaintops, deep soil strata, subterranean caves, hot springs, and ocean floors. In short, mites have colonized almost every terrestrial, marine and fresh water habitat known to man (Krantz, 1978). The Acari exhibit various associations with other organisms, from phytophagy, predation, and parasitism to intricate commensal and phoritic relationships (Evans et aI., 1961).
The mesofauna of the soil exerts an extremely great influence on the processes in the soil through its simple presence, its quantity, and especially through its living processes. One of the most important components of this mesofauna is the representative of the subclass mites (Acari); their abundance even in soils poor in organic materials reaches the order of lO,OOO/m2, in forest litter or moss their abundance reaches the order of lOO,OOO/m2. By long odds, as well as all other greater taxons, mites are very heterogenous as far as life history and especially their type of feeding are concerned and also the abundance of the different groups is also different (Baker and Wharton, 1952).
The knowledge of distribution and abundance of soil fauna as a part of the structure of an ecosystem is very important in order to understand the dynamics of any ecosystem. Every type of soil has unique interactions between members of the fauna, mites included, and the dominance of one group over others varies. (Chiba et ai., 1975 and Santos et af., 1981).
Soil mites are of great biological importance both in natural and in cultivated soils. Of late, much attention has been paid to them especially because of their sensitivity to a number of chemicals used in agriculture.