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.

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    generally be relied on to stimulate them to a special effort. In the act of biting the tail end is raised so that the line of thorax and abdomen makes an angle of forty-five degrees or so with the horizontal; the abdomen becomes very much distended with blood and except at the extreme tip assumes a transparent red colour : as digestion proceeds this red colour darkens and after about five hours the abdomen appears black ; after sixteen hours half the abdomen has been emptied of its contents, while after thirty-six to forty hours the whole meal has been digested and got rid of. When first gorged with blood the insects fly with difficulty, and prefer to sit quietly digesting : they are then easily seen, and can sometimes be caught in the morning sitting inside the mosquito- net.” As to the parts most usually attacked by these flies, it was noticed by Doerr in Herzegovina that Phlebotomies papatasii shows a preference for particular regions of the body, “ especially the ankles, upper part of the feet, wrists and forearms, particularly the flexor surfaces ; the bend of the knees, legs, upper arms, and neck are more rarely bitten, and the face, back of the neck, back, and thighs are generally spared, even in the case of men lying naked.”* With reference to the effects produced by the bite of Phlebotomies papatasii, Doerr writesf :—“ The bites of Mosquitoes are more easily endurable than those of c Pappatacis ’ [Ph. papatasii], which are so painful that the person bitten immediately awakes. The flies exhibit a preference for certain individuals, who are tormented every night, get no sleep until about 5.0 a.m., show a strong reaction with vesicular swellings, oedema, and lymphangitis, suffer frightfully from itching, and look as though they had prurigo, or a peculiar, papular exanthem.” The same author adds that in Herzegovina many of the Austro-Hungarian soldiers, who suffer severely from the attacks of these flies, “ prefer sleeping in the open on warm summer nights to passing the night in rooms full of Pappatacis.” At the present time our knowledge of the Life-history, life-history of Phlebotomus is mainly due to the celebrated Italian zoologist Professor Battista * Doerr, Op. cit., p. 113. f Op. cit., pp. 161—162.