A live bird-parasitic fly, Carnus hemapterus Nitzsch, was retrieved from the external ear canal of a 74-year-old Japanese woman in Yokohama City. Her chief complaint included odd sensation and recurring pain in the right ear. Otoscopic examinations revealed many red spots inside the ear canal, suggesting sucking by the fly. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first case of invasion by this fly species into the human ear canal outside Hokkaido.

The movement of the German cockroach Blattella germanica between conditioned and unconditioned harborages was examined in the laboratory with various arrangements of food and water in the test arena. Three di#erent groups of adult cockroaches were used for the experiments; male-or female-only group and a sexually mixed group. In the case of the sexually separated groups, about 50῎ of males moved into the unconditioned harborage at the end of the experiment, while only a few females moved into the unconditioned harborage during the experimental period of 21 days. However, in the sexually mixed group, males became less active than in the sexually separated group. In contrast, females became active and the number of females moving into the unconditioned harborage was equal to the males after the 15th day of the experiment. When the position of food and water was changed serially the behavioral response of males as well as females was di#erent from that observed under the experimental conditions of fixed position of food and water. These results indicated that male and female cockroaches move together into an unconditioned harborage in mixed group and their moving activity is a#ected by the position of food and water in relation to the location of the conditioned and unconditioned harborage.

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Abstract:The vertical movement of the German cockroach Blattella germanica (Linnaeus) to upper floors was studied using a 700 cm vinyl tube as a model of a drainpipe in buildings and houses. The whole experiment was conducted in the dark. After three days of acclimatization with twenty cockroaches, the acclimated container was connected to the bottom of the tube on the third floor of a building, and two new containers were connected to the tube on the fourth floor (350 cm distant from the third floor) and fifth floors (700 cm distant), respectively. The cockroaches in each container were counted daily for four weeks. Food and water were set in the container on the third floor from the first to seventh day of the experiment, and from the eighth to 28th day, they were placed only in the containers on the fourth and fifth floors. Twenty-eight percent of both male and female German cockroaches stayed in the acclimated container for the first seven days. After food and water were moved to the new containers, many cockroaches moved to the new containers. For the last seven days, 30% of the males and 13% of the females stayed in the new containers, while 7.7% of males and 5.4% females stayed in the acclimated container. Thus, the cockroaches used the vinyl tube for both a passage and for a harborage.

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