Side Note: This is an old blog post from a deleted website that I had in the past. The original date of this post was sometime during the year of 2010.
The Botfly, commonly spelled “Bot Fly,” also known as the torsalo and American warble fly, is about twice the size of a common housefly.
Its maggot larva are known to live as parasites in human flesh, along with other animals and whatnot. The Botfly’s larva burrows itself into the flesh and begins to consume body tissue while being able to breath air from its own backside (as odd as that may sound).
This wicked fly, is a sly little bastard, and often uses mosquitoes to transport their eggs, and when the mosquitoes bite a person, for example, the eggs are released onto the victim due to your body heat.
I recently stumbled upon this subject matter because we had several kittens born a few weeks ago and the mother of the kittens turned up missing, so we had to pay special attention to them. The runt of the bunch, which we named “Crummy,” had this sore on its neck and it seemed to be infected.
My girlfriend put antibiotics on it and brought the cat inside. A couple days later, it seemed to get worse, and it had a swollen ring around the infected area. Well, one night, my girlfriend came running into the bedroom and woke me up. She said, “oh my god…you won’t believe this, something is living inside of Crummy!” She was totally freaked out and it took her hours to calm down.
I looked at what appeared to be this bored out hole in its neck, and ever so many seconds this wormy looking creature would poke its head, ass, or whatever it was, out of the hole and quickly retreat back into Crummy’s neck. To make it short, my girlfriend kept pouring alcohol into the hole, since hydrogen peroxide didn’t seem to work, and it aggravated the Botfly Larva in such a way, it would start to poke out of the opening far enough so she could get some tweezers around it to pull it out.
This is how we come to realize what a Botfly and its larva looked like, and I learned even more about this parasite after searching online for more information. I’ll provide some informative resource links, in a moment. [Edit: Since this post is at least 14 years old, many of the original resource links are no longer available, so I'll skip that part of the post.] But first, I’ll drop down a couple images…
Botfly Larva (maggot):
The Repugnant Botfly:
Update (11-10-2024): After looking back at this subject, years later, what I find odd about that whole ordeal was that the one called the "Human Botfly" were not that common in the United States back then nor are they now. They were mostly found in Central and South America and occasionally found on the southern tips of the U.S. However, after looking back into this subject, I read where we have a different species of this wicked maggot called the "North American Botfly" that lives in the United States, so maybe that was the type we found in that poor cat's neck back in 2010. However, in summary, no matter which type of species it was, to use unscientific terms, I would still classify that thing as "gross," to say the least. ---End of Update
Image Credit: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dermatobia_hominis
---End of Post "Botfly Larva - Wicked Maggot"
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