An entomologist at Harvard University has decided to let bot fly larvae grow inside his own skin and filmed the process by which the maggots crawled out of his skin two months later. It's not something for people with weak stomachs.
Last year, insect researcher Piotr Naskrecki flew to the Central American country of Belize for a photography trip, where he was bitten by mosquitos. After returning home to Boston, he realized three of the mosquito bites were not healing. It turned out those were no ordinary mosquito bites; they had bot fly larvae in it.
Bot flies are parasites that don't have their own jaws, so they can't sting. They need to capture a mosquito to get their eggs into the skin of their hosts. When inside the human body, the larvae develop spikes that latch on to the skin so it's hard for the host to get them out.
Using a snake venom suction device, Naskrecki successfully extracted one of three larvae but then decided to keep the other two inside for research. It took two entire months for the creatures to become maggots that wriggled free out of Naskrecki's skin for an entire 40 minutes, leaving a grisly-looking gaping hole in his skin that thankfully healed after two days.
"The process was not particularly painful," he says. "In fact, I probably would have not noticed it if I had not been waiting for it as the bot fly larvae produce painkillers that make their presence as unnoticeable to the host as possible."
Naskrecki compares the entire process to childbirth.
"I figured that, being a male, it was my only chance to produce another living, breathing being out of my flesh and blood," he says. "Perhaps my opinion would have been different had the bot flies decided to develop in my eyelids, but I actually grew to like my little guests, and watched their growth with the same mix of pleasure and apprehension as when I watch the development of any other interesting organism under my care."
He then goes on to say that he placed the maggots inside a jar filled with earth for pupation, the process of transformation during which the maggots turn into full-grown bot flies. After six weeks, Naskrecki's "offspring" have emerged with huge orange eyes and dazzlingly metallic blue abdomens.
"It's handsome and harmless to humans," he says. "It cannot sting or bite."
The Human Bot Fly from Piotr Naskrecki on Vimeo.
