Insect Life: The Hidden Ecology of Black Flies: Sibling Species and Ecological Scale

Abstract

The words black fly might conjure up images of blood-sucking demons that “stick to their prey like bulldogs” and render their hapless victim “a frightful spectacle … bloody, and covered with punctures”—a view certainly shared by explorers who pioneered the North Country (Cabot in Agassiz 1850). The ability to evoke these images has been honed over evolutionary time by natural selection, producing some of life's most proficient phlebotomists and vectors of disease. The need for blood as a source of nutriment for the eggs has inflicted enormous economic losses on many facets of human activity, from forestry and agriculture to tourism and entertainment. Transmission of diseases, such as human onchocerciasis (or river blindness), mansonellosis, avian leucocytozoonosis, bovine onchocerciasis, and probably several arboviruses, continues to cause great human anguish and economic damage (Crosskey 1990).