File:Human Bot Fly Life Cycle - Geraldo Victorino de Franca Junior.jpg

English: Human Bot Fly , 'Dermatobia hominis' (Lynnaeus Jr.,1781) is a large, beautifully colored fly found from Mexico to Paraguay and NE Argentina. It has a very interesting - and somewhat scary, as human beings are envolved frequently - life cycle. The adults live for a few days - usually not more than 10 - and don't even feed as they don't have bucal organs. The larvae infest skin of many Mammal species. The adult female Human Bot Fly , after mating, attach eggs (from 1 to more than 20 ) to the abdome of different blood-sucking insects, which are captured by the swift and larger botfly in the forests where it lives (even in small patches of woodlands). These eggs hatch when the blood-sucker insect feeds on a warm-blooded host and the larvae quickly penetrates the skin (breathing through two posterior spiracles) and goes through three instars then crawling out its host to pupate on the soil. I went to an extensive research in medical books and on internet to finally create these illustrations.