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Seasonality and daily activity of male and female tabanid flies monitored in a Hungarian hill-country pasture by new polarization traps and traditional canopy traps

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Abstract

Blood-sucking female tabanid flies cause serious problems for animals and humans. For the control of tabanids, the knowledge about their seasonality and daily activity is of great importance. Earlier, only traditional traps capturing exclusively female tabanids have been used to survey tabanid activity. The data of such temporal trapping do not reflect correctly the activity of male and female tabanid flies. Our major aim was to monitor the trapping numbers of male and female tabanids during a 3-month summer survey in Hungary. We used (i) conventional canopy traps with liquid traps on the ground beneath the canopy and (ii) L-shaped sticky traps with vertical and horizontal components. Our other goal was to compare the efficiencies of the two components of each trap type used. We observed two greater peaks of the trapping number of tabanids. These peaks started with increased catches of female tabanids captured by the canopy traps and the vertical sticky traps and ended with a dominance of male and female tabanids caught by the liquid traps and the horizontal sticky traps. The swarming periods were interrupted by rainy/cool days, when the number of tabanids decreased drastically. Among the 17 species, six dominated and composed 89.4 % of the captured tabanids: Haematopota pluvialis, Tabanus tergestinus, Tabanus bromius, Tabanus maculicornis, Tabanus bovinus and Atylotus loewianus. The number of water-seeking male and female tabanids rose up to 12–13 h and then decreased but had a secondary peak at about 17 h. The stochastic weather change and the communities of different species resulted in large standard deviations of the averaged number of tabanids in the course of a day. The horizontally polarizing (liquid and horizontal sticky) traps captured both male and female specimens and were about three times more efficient than the canopy and vertical sticky traps that caught only females. The results of the horizontal sticky traps corresponded to those of the liquid traps, while the catches of the vertical sticky traps corresponded to those of the canopy traps. The catches of the used trap types reflected well the species and water/host-seeking composition of tabanids.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the grant TabaNOid 232366 (Trap for the Novel Control of Horse-flies on Open-air Fields) funded by the European Commission under the seventh framework programme received by G. Horváth and G. Kriska. The financial support from the grant OTKA K-105054 (Full-Sky Imaging Polarimetry to Detect Clouds and to Study the Meteorological Conditions Favourable for Polarimetric Viking Navigation) received by G. Horváth from the Hungarian Science Foundation is also acknowledged. Gábor Horváth thanks the German Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for an equipment donation and a 3-month research fellowship (3.3-UNG/1073032 STP from 1 June to 31 August 2013 in the University of Regensburg). Many thanks to Csaba Viski (Szokolya, Hungary), who allowed our experiments on his horse farm. We also thank the constructive comments of two anonymous reviewers of the earlier drafts of this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Environmental Optics Laboratory, Department of Biological Physics, Physical Institute, Eötvös University, Pázmány sétány 1, 1117, Budapest, Hungary

    Tamás Herczeg, Miklós Blahó, Dénes Száz & Gábor Horváth

  2. Group for Methodology in Biology Teaching, Biological Institute, Eötvös University, Pázmány sétány 1, 1117, Budapest, Hungary

    György Kriska

  3. Danube Research Institute, Centre for Ecological Research, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Karolina ut 29-31, 1113, Budapest, Hungary

    György Kriska

  4. Department of Parasitology and Zoology, Faculty of Veterinary Science, Szent István University, István utca 2, 1078, Budapest, Hungary

    Mónika Gyurkovszky & Róbert Farkas

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  1. Tamás Herczeg
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  2. Miklós Blahó
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  3. Dénes Száz
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  7. Gábor Horváth
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Correspondence to Gábor Horváth.

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Herczeg, T., Blahó, M., Száz, D. et al. Seasonality and daily activity of male and female tabanid flies monitored in a Hungarian hill-country pasture by new polarization traps and traditional canopy traps. Parasitol Res 113, 4251–4260 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00436-014-4103-6

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