I just had a huge, about three and a half centimeters across, loud buzzing black fly come into my room. I caught it with a blanket and shoved it into a vase, inspected it closely and Googled it. It turned out to be a black horsefly (Tabanus atratus), female. The females are vampires. They need fresh blood. For the eggs. And their bites are very painful. Essentially, a horsefly’s mouth is like scissors. A pair of serrated mandibles which they use to saw into the skin, opening up capillaries, and then they lick up the blood from the resulting pool. It’s said that their bites hurt a lot because you are literally being cut by these scissors. An anticoagulant is injected into the blood to prevent it from clotting, so the wound oozes for a long time after the horsefly has flown away. They can easily bite through fabric, so a shirt offers no protection.
So, it turns out that horseflies are possibly the fastest flying insects on the planet. Males of the genus Hybomitra (which also live here) are credited with speeds up to 145 km/h, and this, by some estimates, is the record for horizontal flight among insects (though this figure is indirectly obtained: an entomologist made a male chase a bullet shot from an air rifle, it intercepted it in the air, meaning it was flying faster than the pellet). Furthermore, horseflies are attracted to polarized light. This is how they find water — a smooth surface reflects light horizontally polarized, and for the horseflies, this is a beacon “here you can lay eggs”. Interestingly, this is also why white horses get significantly fewer bites, because they almost do not polarize reflected light. For these experiments, Gabor Horvat and his colleagues received the 2016 Ig Nobel Prize. Among other things, they smeared full-size horse models with glue and painted dummies to thoroughly check everything.
By the way, I released my captive.
Hi, I'm Rauf Aliev. 