by Matthew Cobb
I told you it was difficult! Jerry couldn’t see it, either. Reader Richard spotted it suspiciously quickly. Maybe he checked out @JackDAshby’s tw*tter feed, where Jack told me:
@matthewcobb yep go for it. The batfly is the unpleasant collection of knees 1cm in from the bat's left wing.
— Jack Ashby (@JackDAshby) December 7, 2015
As Richard posted on imgur:
Here’s a Nycteribiidae bat fly from Switzerland in all its horror glory:
Remember – this is a fly, not a louse or a flea. This photo from Wikipedia was taken by Gilles San Martin.
I was right!
Fer wuns.
Seriously. How about stop the neutrino in the bat next time. There’s probably 10^18 of them in there. 🙂
Just last week I felt something in my hair near my ear. I plucked it out and thought it was a spider. However, I counted its six legs and then went looking in the Golden Guide to insect pests. There was a similar thing called “sheep ked” pictured in the book. Mine is most likely a “deer ked”, Lipoptena cervi (family Hippoboscidae). This was new to me. I live in the north central part of Vermont where there are whitetail deer and moose, the probable normal hosts of this ked. It has two wings which drop off when the fly finds a suitable host. Mine had no wings, so I guess it thought me suitable. It sucks blood, may cause inflammation, but is thought not to transmit disease organisms or viruses. What fun!
A little unsettling! But I’m impressed you looked it up–I would have, too. All in all, better than a deer tick.
Considering that I’ve known of ticks since I-don’t-know-when, but never heard of “keds” until now, I don’t place too much confidence in
We (including out coterie of ked specialists) may not know of diseases that they transmit, and our immune systems may not know of diseases that they transmit. That doesn’t mean that they don’t transmit diseases, just that we don’t know about it.
You could have kept it as a pet & studied it!