this thing. what the fuck is it. why is a tiny bord crawling with these comparitively huge parasite fly mite things. i tried to squash it three times and in the way of mite-lice things, it kept fuckin going. there were at least 6+ on her in various sizes.
note- i wouldnt normally recommend handling injured wild birds but i saw movement in her feathers and decided to investigate.
Iām so jealous of people who get to meet the ultra-weird hippoboscidae in person. In all my messing around with nature Iāve never seen a trace of one!
They probably arenāt bothering the bird that much really, as big as they seem in comparison to it.
They vary in their wing-ed-ness. Some have wings big enough to fly, others have stunted useless ones or none at all.
Some just fly once, but they never leave the first host they find and their wings tear off in the hostās fur or feathers!
They mostly feed on birds and bats, but there are also those that live on big, grazing mammals.
So many mean anecdotes on this post.
If they were tiny, tiny little bats Iām not sure people would just talk about all the ways they killed them and how horrific and disturbing they are, even the āscientificā blog I linked, which is really disappointing. I donāt feel like a proper biologist should find anything they study to be scary or ugly.
Parasites arenāt evil. Parasites are just animals that evolved to be really good at resource management by only taking what they need. Sometimes they can become dangerous or painful, but everybodyās favorite bears, dolphins, lions and hawks always are to their food. They rip the guts out of still-struggling meals and wolf down hunks of tissue. Thatās a heckload creepier and grosser than a teeny-weeny vampire can ever be.
Hippoboscids are host-specific, so they wonāt even bite anything but the one specific species of animal they live on; humans donāt have anything to fear from them.
this one is so pretty! They all are, but Iāve never seen these colors in any other photos.
