Bull's horn: description, features and habitat

For many rural residents, flies are a real disaster. I remember, even Pushkin lamented in his novel in verse that flies and mosquitoes make it difficult to enjoy the summer red. Perhaps the great poet has not yet met a bull's horn, or else a special place has been assigned to him in verse. Or maybe Alexander Sergeyevich simply turned him into a flies. After all, both of them belong to the same detachment - Diptera.

Swamp - large flies, bloodsuckers

Any representative of the nest causes the warm-blooded animal to bite his bites. But the bullish horsefly is in this ranking among the first. It's too painful he bites, cutting his body with his stilettos, located near the mouth. Yes, even admits into the wound material, so that the blood does not curl longer. Because of this, the place of the bite becomes inflamed, itches. Maybe even an animal or a person can have a fever, a feeling of health. With multiple bites, high intoxication was registered in people, which had to be treated in a hospital.

This insect, after all, is only called - a bull's horn. But in fact, he does not disdain anyone. Cows and horses that are on a leash, if they are attacked by a lot of flies, break down and run away from these places. It also happens that the animal, tormented by stinging insects, rushes into an impenetrable thicket, so that the branches of trees and bushes deliver them from the agony, go into the water and get stuck in the swamps.

It's good if they return to their place of detention. But often a beast that has lost its orientation from pain can get lost and do not find the way back, being caught by a rope of a leash for bushes or trunks of trees, to perish without water and drink. And marshes do not always let go of their prey.

If you can even knock off a stinging insect with a painful tail, legs, horns, then it is almost impossible to shake them off the head and muzzles. Careful owners even put on their pets specially sewn sweatshirts, which the bulldog can not cut through. Some even manage to make and put stockings on the legs of cattle to protect the poor animal from this scourge.

He did not just bite me - he infected me with disease!

Bovine cherepene - insect is extremely harmful. In addition to the fact that this bloodsucker annoys cattle with his bites, he is a distributor of various diseases. These include tularemia, anthrax, filariasis, trypanosomiasis, and poliomyelitis.

The sword of bulls does not disdain to taste bloody corpses of three days ago. And this is even more terrible than the transfer of infection from one living being to another. After all, if an animal has fallen just because of a deadly disease, then there is no guarantee that the insect will not infect it with a human being or domestic animals.

Scientific classification

This insect refers to the type Arthropods. Buckling bull - a kind of Dipterous insects. The suborder of this insect is Short-tailed. His scientific name is Tabanus bovinus. He is part of the family of horseflies. Their females are components of the nemesis.

Archaeologists find the remains of the ancestors of modern flies. Approximate time of their habitation is Oligocene.

Appearance

The bull's sword is a large fly. It reaches at a rate of 2.4 centimeters. This is the largest insect among Diptera.

The insect body is colored dark brown with blackish stripes. The breast is covered with yellow-black hairs. The abdomen itself is flat, consisting of segments. In the middle of each tergite there is a gray-yellow or white elongated triangle with concave sides. On the lateral edges of the abdomen there is a yellow-red band.

The wings of the bull's-eye are brown, transparent. Behind the two well-developed wings are two buzzards.

The eyes of the insect are large, with multicolored iridescent divorces. The females have a visible dividing line between them. Slepen the bull male differs from it in that it has almost no discernible interglamness, it is so small.

External differences between heterozygous individuals are called sexual dimorphism. In the flies it is expressed in the fact that the abdomen of the male is pointed at the tip, and in the female it is round.

Propagation of the Bull's Horn

This is one of the most enduring creatures on Earth. A bull's horn is an insect that lives in almost all corners of Eurasia and even in Africa in the north-west of the continent. It can be found even in the mountains, 2 km above sea level. There are no flies only, perhaps, in places of permafrost and in a desert that is absolutely devoid of vegetation.

And it happens because the horsefly is a bull, whose habitat is the fringes of the forest, pasture, coast of reservoirs, is capable of producing a large number of offspring in a single season.

Reproduction of the Bull's Horn

The female at a time lays to a thousand elongated grayish eggs, attaching them to the leaves of plants. It prefers an insect to do this near water bodies. After hatching, the larvae burrow into moist soil. There they lead a predatory life. After a while, the larvae pupate. During this period they are very similar to the pupae of butterflies.

Before the important process of laying eggs, the female should be well supported by the blood of animals, birds or people. In some cases, when there are no warm-blooded mammals around, the insect attacks even the lizards. And these reptiles are cold-blooded reptiles.

This fact once again confirms the opinion that this bullshit is called this bloodsucking bastard in vain. He or, more precisely, she does not adhere to a clearly limited framework, when the question is about who exactly to attack, in order to get enough.

Why in the previous sentence was used clarification on the basis of gender? Yes, because the bull mare eats nectar and sugary isolates of plants and aphids. For this reason, he is not bloodsucking. And the female before fertilization also does not need blood.

Three to four days after laying, the female can repeat the procedure of bloodsucking. After that, she again is able to put off a batch of eggs. This process can be repeated up to five times per season. As a result, the female horsefly will post up to 3500 pieces of eggs!

Importance in nature

Many people, especially rural people, who are harassed by these vicious blood-sucking flies and interfere in the farming of livestock, raise the question: why not lime bully? But, it turns out, this can not be done. After all, this insect, like all others, is a component of natural communities. Having wiped it from the face of the Earth, it is possible to break the steady balance. It will necessarily respond with a negative manifestation.

In fact, the horns serve as food for dozens of groups of animals: birds, fish, reptiles. No wonder many fishermen use this insect as bait. And quite successfully, by the way.

The corpses of insects, falling to the ground, fertilize it, which is also one of the reasons for the inexhaustibility of our soils.

Another question: how to reduce the harm caused by this nasty thing? As it turned out, the horns do not tolerate the smell of wormwood. Therefore, it is recommended that the beams of this fragrant grass be weighed at the door jambs and window frames during the period of special activity of these insects (in June-July). It is unlikely that there is a horsefly that ventured to overcome this obstacle.

In the farmyards, in order to reduce the number of bloodsuckers, they arrange special ponds for them, pouring in a little fuel oil or kerosene. Insects, trying to get drunk during the flight, can not fly up and fall into a puddle where they die.

People forced at noon to do business in the garden or in the yard, graze animals on pastures or perform work in the field, use chemical repellents as a protection against bites. Also, clothing from dense fabric helps them. The face is protected with a hat with a mesh, which beekeepers usually use.

Interesting facts related to the way of life of the bull horn

Adult insects of this species do not feed. Imago most of the time are in flight, focusing on vision.

Female females react to large objects that move. Therefore, they often choose cars or boats as their victims and begin to pursue them. The speed of a moving object can reach 40 kilometers per hour. And the daphni will pursue a boat, sailed from the coast for several hundred kilometers!

The experiments proved that the hills do not attack the striped objects. Apparently, this is due to the structure of their visual organs. Especially, they are knocked down by such fact, as not parallel strips. Zebras, which have exactly this color, practically do not suffer from the attack of the flies.