When I was travelling in Honduras, I stayed with Laurie and Ethan, two Peace Corps volunteers living on the North coast. They had a dog, nicknamed "Hondo" who had a few swollen infections in his knee. Turns out these infections were bot flies - bot flies who plant their larva where mosquitos pick them up, and then the mosquitos bite a mammal and leave the larva under the skin, where it pupates and grows until it matures enough to fly out in a shower of blood and torn skin. At least that's how I understood it. I pulled the bot fly larva out of the dog's knee with my leatherman pliers while Ethan held him still. Poor dog.

I rushed back from Austin this last week, after a 6 hour Mesa-airlines delay (like Joi described). Two hours after being on the ground, I was at a hotel in downtown Oakland, working as scribe, webmaster and scratch artist for the Indie Game Jam 2. Someone requrested some "sprites" - game characters resembling flies. I went through house flies, tsetse flies, and finally I remembered bot flies. I wasn't prepared for graphic unsettling photos of bot fly infestation of human eyeballs. Whew.

However, I was pleasantly surprised by pictures of wildflowers and their associates - high resolution pictures of flowers and bugs that love them, taken by someone passionate about insect. Pretty potato beetle!