Illustrations of African blood-sucking flies other than mosquitoes and tsetse-flies / by Ernest Edward Austen.

  • Ernest Edward Austen
Date:
1909
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Illustrations of African blood-sucking flies other than mosquitoes and tsetse-flies / by Ernest Edward Austen. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    162/274 (page 142)
    commonest and most widely distributed are Stomoxys nigra, Macq. (Plate XIII., fig. 101), and the almost cosmopolitan S. calcitrans, Linn. (Plate XIII., fig. 102). The species of Stomoxys are small greyish, brownish- or blackish-grey, or blackish flies, about 5.5 to 7 mm. in length, in the case of African species, with a slender, shining black, chitinous proboscis projecting horizontally from beneath and in front of the head. Except in the darker species, the thorax is marked with clove-brown or blackish longitudinal stripes, and the abdomen bears brown or blackish spots or transverse bands. The sexes can be distinguished by the eyes being much closer together in the male than in the female ; in the case of S. omega, Newstead (Plate XIII., fig. 96), a further sexual difference is constituted by a remarkable series of curled hairs on the inside of the front tarsi of the male (see p. 158). Stomoxys attacks human beings as well as animals, and is capable of inflicting a painful bite, at least a third of the proboscis being driven into the skin. There can be little doubt that the life-history Life-history, of all species is similar to that of S. calcitrans (see pp. 146-148), the metamorphoses of which have as yet alone been studied. The available evidence on this subject will be Stomoxys found fully detailed in the notes on S. calcitrans and Disease, and S. nigra, which would appear to be the only species with which experiments have yet been made, and to one or other of which all observations refer. Stomoxys calcitrans, Linnaeus. Systema Naturae, Ed. X., T. I., p. 604 [Conops] (1758) : Fauna Suecica, Ed. II., p. 467, 1900 [Conops] (1761). Plate XIII., fig. 102. Stomoxys calcitrans, a common and well-known pest of human beings and domestic animals in Europe, and S. nigra, Macq.,* * See below, p.153, and Plate XIII., Fig. 101.