Torsalo

• GeneralIt sticks its eggs to other insects so that they deposit them on the skin of mammals and people.
• It does not lay its eggs on the host: it catches mosquitoes and other biting insects in flight and glues its eggs to their bodies. When the mosquito lands on a warm-blooded animal, the heat of the skin makes them hatch. That strategy is called phoresy.
• It does this because the adult is large, loud and conspicuous, and could not approach without being noticed.
• The larva settles under the skin and breathes through a small central hole; the lesion is often mistaken for a bacterial boil and does not respond to antibiotics.
• The adult looks like a bumblebee: yellow face, metallic blue abdomen and orange legs covered in dense hair.

Skeleton type

Invertebrate - chitin exoskeleton (insect)

Habitat and environment

Rainforest and rural tropical country

Size at birth

The female cements 10 to 50 eggs onto the abdomen of a mosquito or another blood-feeding arthropod (phoresy)

Sexual maturity

It reaches sexual maturity shortly after emerging from the puparium, is sexually active within two hours and can lay viable eggs from its second day of adult life

Gestation / incubation

The egg takes 5 to 9 days to develop once it has been attached to the carrier arthropod; the larva spends between 5 and 10 weeks under the host's skin, the pupa lasts 4 to 11 weeks and the full cycle, 11 to 17 weeks

Litter / clutch size

From 100 to 400 eggs, spread among different mosquitoes over 8 or 9 days

Sources consulted: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dermatobia_hominis; Animal Diversity Web, Dermatobia hominis; Merck Veterinary Manual; CDC DPDx; ScienceDirect, Dermatobia hominis; UF/IFAS EDIS EENY-440