I posted this originally on my Facebook page because I thought it was way too gross to put on the blog. But word of it spread at last night’s Birds and Beers and people want to see it.
WARNING–THIS IS A TOTALLY GROSS VIDEO! DO NOT EAT ANYTHING WHILE WATCHING IT! Don’t watch it if you are remotely squeamish about gross and nasty parasitic bugs.
But if you are like me and interested in all things natural history and creatures that are willing to knock us down a peg or two on the food chain (or at the very least, use me as the piece of meat that I am) then you will love this video.
Dear blog reader Roy H. sent me this as a warning to be careful while in Panama. Heck, how did I not get one of these in Guatemala last year? It’s a video of a woman who has a bot fly larvae in her scalp showing you how they got it out. It also has a lot of great info about bot flies but chances are good that you will be squealing so loud while you watch it that you won’t hear it.
Hasty Brook was at Birds and Beers and she’s encountered these in her work as a nurse. She warned me not to scratch any mosquito bites. She spent a good portion of the evening reminding me, “Don’t scratch!”
So. Here it is. You have been warned. It’s GROSS!
Here is the link to The Bot Fly Removal Video.
And here is a photo of a cleansing Trumpeter Swan photo that I took Sunday afternoon:
I lied. I watched creepy and fascinating again.
That’s one of my squick things, bugs living in me, but i can watch those with no real problem, other than then imagining any pimple is now a botfly.
I worked in Panama in the early 90s and had my own opportunity to figure out how to remove a botfly. If you get one you’ll have quite a while to put the clues together – at first it will seem like you have a mosquito bite that isn’t healing. Eventually you’ll start to feel a sharp pain every now and then as the larva grows and starts to wriggle a bit under your skin. People had told me you could get them out by suffocating them with duct tape (mine was on my wrist) – but all that did for me was encourage every single chigger in the area to crawl under the tape and join in the fun!
Yep. There are even grosser ones on YouTube in which they pull out a live, squirming one. There’s one where they get a bunch out of a kid’s neck. Yet, not as gross as certain videos showing doctors lancing sebaceous cysts (or the now-famous “Two Girls, One Cyst”). There’s also a particularly horrific one of a doctor lancing an infected arm (we’re talking pints of yuck streaming out).
Love the cleansing photo. Love the duck in the background, too, like he’s trying sneak past the paparazzi.
Horror! Better than anything Hollywood could dream up.
Disgustlingly Awesome!
I will not watch this because I have a friend who told me of her own botfly removal story in Brazil. The doctors were on strike, so she asked a neighbor, who told her to tape a piece of fatback over it because the larva would prefer that to her, and move house. It worked.
pretty disgusting, but so cool.
The first time I heard about scalp botflies was on NPR when someone was interviewing Mark Moffett, a National Geographic writer and photographer. His description at the time was hilarious, saying he fell to his knees, probably screaming, right in the middle of the Harvard campus, when the beast emerged. I just found this on the web:
“… he returned from a research trip into the Peruvian canopy with an annoying, crawly itch in his scalp. “I was showing everybody this lump that was getting bigger and bigger,” he recalls. Worried that a mosquito bite might have transferred a botfly maggot to his scalp, he stopped by Harvard’s Tropical Medicine office. “They were stumped and suggested I schedule a time to come back and have whatever was in there cut out.” But as he was walking home, he suddenly felt something on his head. “I felt this finger coming out of my scalp,” he says. “I had just seen Aliens and wondered what bizarre creature was popping out of my head. I dropped down to my knees; just the thought made me feel a bit faint. Then I reached up and pulled this inch-long grub out of my scalp. Meanwhile, my head was collapsing from the space this thing left.” He had been working on a National Geographic story called “Life in a Nutshell,” about how insects cut and drill their way inside acorns and use them as edible homes. “After that experience, I could easily empathize with those poor little acorns.”
Indeed!