Kamloops resident Marshall Krasser was filming an episode for his YouTube channel on his backwoods property near Adams Lake when he saw something unusual crawling on the ground.

It was a beetle covered with thousands of tiny mites.

“I was looking down and noticed a movement on the forest floor,” he said in a message to iNFOnews.ca. “Dropping down to eye level, this horror is what was revealed!”

Lying flat on his stomach, the seasoned film maker was able to get a clear video of the burdened beetle as it maneuvered quickly through leaves and grass, and while alarming looking, beetles carrying mites on their backs is a common occurrence.

There are several species of burying beetle that work with several species of mites in a symbiotic or mutually beneficial way, according to Entomology Blog.

Buring beetles travel around looking for dead carcasses to breed on. The mites hitch a rid on a beetle’s back and hop off onto the carcass where they eat fly eggs and freshly hatched fly maggots that compete with the beetle larvae for the food source.

A mite covered beetle is more likely to have offspring that survive.

“There are always fascinating things to discover out in nature. This one was pretty creepy, ” Krasser said.

He discovered the beetle while filming an episode for his YouTube series Canadian Mountain Men.