It’s summer time and very hot and humid. Mosquitos are everywhere and there isn’t enough spray to keep them away. One lands on your skin and bites you before you could kill it. Did you know where that mosquito had been before it landed on your skin and bit you? You do not want to know!

A common fly more prevalent in Mexico and South America called the botfly, uses mosquitoes to reproduce it’s young. The botlfy highjacks a mosquito in mid-flight. While still flying the botfly glues its eggs onto the mosquitos body. When the mosquito lands on a person or another animal the body heat melts the glue around the eggs. As the mosquito begins to suck the blood from the host, the eggs crawl into the host’s body.

For six weeks the worms grow and feast upon the host. The injury occurs when the animal or the human notices the bump from the growing worm underneath their skin. Removing the botfly larvae is painful and difficult. The worm just doesn’t want to leave! The hard tifts on the backs of the maggots make it impossible for the host to remove them without surgical procedures.

However without the removal of the larvae, the host can become very sick with infecction, even a small fragment of the larvae can cause an infection. Therefore, the whole maggot must be removed.

Before the removal of the botfly, the host must suffocate the larvae by putting nail polish, vaseline, or a band-aid over the hole in the skin. If the host does not detect that botfly larvae is growing inside of them, after a couple of weeks the larvae will eat through soft tissue and make their way to the muscle tissue.

Eventually the botfly larvae will get too big to grow under the skin, so they will eat their way out of the flesh amd fall onto the ground, and becomes a botfly, and the life

cycle continues.