Preliminary list of horse flies (Diptera, Tabanidae) of Serbia

Abstract

Thirty six species of horse flies (Tabanidae) were previously known from Serbia (Europe). The present faunistic study of horse flies (Tabanidae) has resulted in the recording of the 4 new species Atylotus fulvus (Meigen, 1804); Tabanus miki Brauer in Brauer and Bergenstamm, 1880; Tabanus unifasciatus Loew, 1858; and Heptatoma pellucens (Fabricius, 1776), in the fauna of Serbia. The genus Heptatoma Meigen, 1803 is cited for the first time in the fauna of Serbia. 40 species are currently known from Serbia, belonging to nine genera. The fauna can be considered relatively poorly studied. Most of the species belong to the Boreal-Eurasian type of fauna 23, followed by the South European group with 8 species, the Mediterranean group with 6 species, European group with 2 species and Central European group with 1 species.

Why do horseflies need polarization vision for host detection? Polarization helps tabanid flies to select sunlit dark host animals from the dark patches of the visual environment

“…Fecundity may further increase when blood is extracted from warm-blooded animals when compared with cold-blooded ones [7]. Owing to the required amount of blood sucked for egg laying, usually several hosts have to be visited by a female blood-sucking insect, thus more efficient host detection becomes an advantage [8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19]. As a consequence, biting insects may spread lethal pathogens to their hosts, including humans [11,20,21].…”

Experimental study of linear and circular polarization sensitivity in different insect species, especially in horseflies and scarab beetles

“…This fact is exploited in chemically-baited tabanid traps (Thompson, 1969;Hribar et al, 1992;Hall et al, 1998;Lehane, 2005;Mihok and Mulye, 2010;Mihok and Lange, 2012). For example, traps baited with ammonium hydroxide captured four times more tabanids than unbaited traps (Krcmar, 2005).…”

Rasprostranjenost vrste Heptatoma pellucens (Fabricius, 1776) (Diptera: Tabanidae) u Hrvatskoj

“…Collected specimens of Heptatoma pellucens in 2022 represent 29.34% of all collected specimens of this species in Croatia. During this century, Heptatoma pellucens was recorded for the first time in the territory of neighbouring Serbia (Krčmar 2011) and Bosnia and Herzegovina (Mikuska et al 2008). Due to its appearance and great similarity to honey bees, it most likely remained undetected in earlier studies in these countries, which leaves opportunities for more research and new entomologists to work with this interesting insect.…”