Another, very interesting fly known as Gyrostigma, resembles a wasp, and is a beautiful metallic blue with scarlet legs and head stripe, but devoid of mouth parts. Once this fly has hatched from a pupa in the ground, it must find a living rhino within its five day life span in order to to begin its mysterious life-cycle anew. The late David Sheldrick, founder Warden Kenya's giant Tsavo East National Park, and a famous Naturalist in his time, was one of the very first people to successfully hatch a Gyrostigma fly from a bot passed in the dung of a rhino. Many rhinos harbour large infestations of bots which might possibly become parasitic should the animal be in poor physical condition. At first it was assumed that these worked their way along to either the nose or mouth of the animal, but in fact, by observing them on our orphans, we discovered that they simply bore straight through the hide and from there somehow end up within the stomach itself.
Most rhinos also have lesions behind the shoulders and under the chin and stomach.
These obviously itch and irritate, because they are rubbed against rocks and trees until they become open weeping wounds that stubbornly resist healing. The culprit for these lesions is apparently a filarial worm that again is specific to rhinos in Africa, but is known amongst horses in the far East. It is on these wounds that we have applied Negasunct with a good deal of success. We have tried many other medications over the years, but none has done the job as well as the Negasunct which has always very kindly been donated to us by Bayer in Switzerland for our orphaned rhinos. The vector of the Rhino filarial worm is thought to be another fly known as Rhinomusca which resembles the common housefly and again is specific to rhinos, feeding on their blood.