Tsetse Flies

Close up!

One of my least favorite creatures here are the tsetse flies. There are about two or three dozen species of these flies located throughout Africa. These flies are quite a bit larger than a typical North American housefly and their bite is ferocious. They can even bite through denim jeans!  They attracted to bright colors, very dark colors, metallic fabric, and the color blue, as well as movement. That means that when they spot your care (hopefully not blue colored) moving through they bush, they quickly latch on and follow you. This can result in either an infestation inside your car or the maniacal buzz of the flies outside your car. At the worst times, this literally sounds like rain pounding down on your car and given that our car does not have air conditioning, we choose to suffer in the heat than open the windows.

Many camps put up these contraptions of treated material to lure the tsetses.

All personal discomfort aside, the tsetse flies have quite an interesting story that I'll shamelessly copy/paste from Wikipedia. Some of the species of tsetse flies carry trypanosomes, which cause human sleeping sickness and animal trypanosomiasis, both of which can be fatal to humans and livestock. Luckily, the tsetses by us do not carry this!

From Wikipedia:

The depopulated and apparently primevally wild Africa seen in wildlife documentary films was formed in the 19th century by disease, a combination of rinderpest and the tsetse fly. In 1887, the rinderpest virus was accidentally imported in livestock brought by an Italian expeditionary force to Eritrea. It spread rapidly, reaching Ethiopia by 1888, the Atlantic coast by 1892, and South Africa by 1897. Rinderpest, a cattle plague from central Asia, killed over 90% of the cattle of the pastoral peoples such as the Masai of east Africa. With no native immunity, most of the population – some 5.5 million cattle – died in southern Africa. Pastoralists were left with no animals, their source of income; farmers were deprived of their working animals for ploughing and irrigation. The pandemic coincided with a period of drought, causing widespread famine. The starving human populations died of smallpox, cholera, typhoid and diseases imported from Europe. It is estimated that two thirds of the Masai died in 1891

The land was left emptied of its cattle and its people, enabling the colonial powers Germany and Britain to take over Tanzania and Kenya with little effort. With greatly reduced grazing, grassland turned rapidly to bush. The closely cropped grass sward was replaced in a few years by woody grassland and thornbush, ideal habitat for tsetse flies. Wild mammal populations increased rapidly, accompanied by the tsetse fly. Highland regions of east Africa which had been free of tsetse fly were colonised by the pest, accompanied by sleeping sickness, until then unknown in the area. Millions of people died of the disease in the early 20th century.