Animals: Bristled Botfly

An odd little insect is the botfly. It irritates cattle and has no bristles. Odder still is a nameless fly, distant cousin to the housefly, whose larvae live by crawling into other insects, such as Japanese beetles and gypsy moths, and eating them from the inside. Between these two flies science recognized no kinship, but the Smithsonian Institution’s Raymond C. Shannon guessed better. He went to southwestern Argentina, climbed high, searched long. He found a fly. Back to the Smithsonian in Washington he hastened. There Entomologist Charles Henry Tyler Townsend examined the Shannon fly, pronounced it the missing link between botfly and parasitic fly, a hitherto unknown phenomenon, a botfly with bristles. Entomologist Shannon’s find, enthused Entomologist Townsend, is “the most important oestromuscoid discovery of the 20th Century.”