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 & environment

Rainforest and rural tropical country

Gestation / incubation

The larva spends between 5 and 10 weeks under the host's skin; the full cycle takes about three or four months

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