Horsefly
| Horsefly | ||||||||||||
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Horsefly ( Tabanus sudeticus ) |
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| Systematics | ||||||||||||
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| Scientific name | ||||||||||||
| Tabanus sudeticus | ||||||||||||
| Zeller , 1842 |
The horsefly ( Tabanus sudeticus ) is the largest Central European representative of the horsefly (Tabanidae).
features
The animals are 19 to 24.5 millimeters long and have a gray-brown body color. The thorax is olive brown to gray in color and has three indistinct, light longitudinal lines. The segments of the abdomen are dark brown and each has a narrow light brown border at the back, which is slightly wider on the sides of the body. On the upper side of the second to fifth segment there is a forward-facing light brown triangle in the exact center of this edge. Their compound eyes are monochrome dark brown, which distinguishes them mainly from the similar, somewhat smaller gadfly ( Tabanus bovinus ), which has green eyes.
Occurrence
The animals are common throughout the Palearctic . They occur particularly in the area around horse and cattle pastures from June to August.
Way of life
The animals fly with a deep and clearly audible hum.
As with almost all horseflies, only the females suck blood, especially from horses and cattle.
The white, elongated eggs are laid on plants in flat, disorganized piles. The whitish-green-brown larvae hatching from it have creeping bulges . They live in the earth and eat both rotting plant material and small living things that are killed by poison. This is injected through the mouthparts.
Horsefly as a disease carrier
Horseflies have been identified as mechanical carriers ( vectors ) of the EIA virus, which belongs to the lentiviruses . Your proboscis is large enough to store these viruses inside and outside in sufficient quantities for infection , like in an injection needle . If a blood meal is interrupted on an EIA virus-infected animal, they can transfer infectious blood adhering to their mouthparts over a short distance within about 30 minutes to a neighboring animal that has not yet been infected.
The horsefly is also mentioned as an occasional carrier of Borrelia , which causes the Lyme disease .
As a defense, horseflies can be fought chemically with insecticides or attracted and caught with attractants . A black plastic ball warmed by sunlight can simulate the rear of a horse without chemical attractants and bring the insects to land there. When taking off, the insects can only climb up, where they are guided through a funnel-shaped net into a catcher container, from which they can no longer come out.
literature
- Heiko Bellmann : The New Cosmos Insect Guide. Franckh-Kosmos, Stuttgart 1999, ISBN 3-440-07682-2 .
- Joachim & Hiroko Haupt: Flies and mosquitoes: observation, way of life. Naturbuch-Verlag, Augsburg 1998, ISBN 3-89440-278-4 .
Individual evidence
- ^ Friedrich-Loeffler-Institut - Federal Research Institute for Animal Health: Equine infectious anemia / transmission. ( Memento of September 28, 2008 in the Internet Archive ).
- ^ Guideline on neuroborreliosis of the German Society for Neurology . In: AWMF online (as of 2011).
- ↑ Daniel Junker: What kind of strange structure is that in Leinemasch? , Hannoversche Allgemeine from September 23, 2016, accessed on May 5, 2017.
