Discovery of a Parasitoid and a Predator of Bat Flies (Diptera: Streblidae) at La
نویسندگان
چکیده
While netting bats to collect streblid bat flies at La Selva Biological Station, Costa Rica, two different natural enemies of streblids were found attacking the bat flies on two species of bats. One was identified as a parasitoid in the hymenopteran family, Braconidae, while the other was a predaceous plant bug in the hemipteran family, Miridae. This is the first description of a natural enemy of streblids being collected in situ (i.e., actively foraging through the hair of the streblid bat host).
منابع مشابه
Review of the Bat Flies of Honduras, Central America (Diptera: Streblidae)
Streblid bat flies are obligate and host-specific blood-feeding ectoparasites of bats. While the bat flies of some American countries are well studied (e.g., Panama, Venezuela), little is known about Honduran Streblidae. Accumulation of substantial numbers of specimens, from several different collections, has enabled a relatively thorough treatment of the fauna. This study is based on 2,236 spe...
متن کاملBat flies - obligate ectoparasites of bats
Bat flies (Diptera: Hippoboscoidea) are highly specialized ectoparasites and only associate with bats (Mammalia: Chiroptera). They live in the fur and on the wing membranes where they feed on host blood. Bat flies are nominally divided into two cosmopolitan families, Streblidae and Nycteribiidae, but recent phylogenetic studies suggest these are not natural groups (Dittmar et al. 2006). Nycteri...
متن کاملEvolution, multiple acquisition, and localization of endosymbionts in bat flies (Diptera: Hippoboscoidea: Streblidae and Nycteribiidae).
Bat flies are a diverse clade of obligate ectoparasites on bats. Like most blood-feeding insects, they harbor endosymbiotic prokaryotes, but the origins and nature of these symbioses are still poorly understood. To expand the knowledge of bacterial associates in bat flies, the diversity and evolution of the dominant endosymbionts in six of eight nominal subfamilies of bat flies (Streblidae and ...
متن کاملDistributional Evidence for Cospeciation between Neotropical Bats and Their Bat Fly Ectoparasites
Distributional evidence bearing on cospeciation of New World bats (superfamily Noctilionoidea) and associated bat flies (Diptera: Streblidae) was analyzed and revealed substantial phylogenetic structure, especially when we focused on “normal” host associations and encoded the data set hierarchically. Brooks’ parsimony analyses of bat fly occurrences among hosts recovered generally accepted sets...
متن کاملDescriptive ecology of bat flies (Diptera: Hippoboscoidea) associated with vampire bats (Chiroptera: Phyllostomidae) in the cerrado of Central Brazil.
We studied the ectoparasitic bat flies of three phyllostomid vampire bat species. Bats were collected monthly from April 2004-March 2005 in caves within the Cafuringa Environmental Protection Area in the Federal District of Brazil. A total of 1,259 specimens from six species in the Streblidae family were collected from 332 bats. High host affinity from the sampled bat fly species and high preva...
متن کامل