A video of an unusual “gross” sighting captured in a grassy yard has gone viral on Reddit.
The clip was shared by u/ImplicationOfDanger and has garnered more than 24,000 upvotes since it was posted on May 4. The post titled “What’s this thing in my yard?” shows a dark, wet-looking blob squirming around in a patch of grass, moving itself in and out of the dirt.
Deby Cassill, an integrative biologist and associate professor at the University of South Florida, told Newsweek that “this is definitely a botfly larvae,” noting that “most are internal parasites on mammals, digging into the scalp or entering the digestive tract.”
Cassill said: “The word ‘bot’ means a maggot. A warble is a skin lump or callus caused by the presence of a botfly maggot under the skin. The human botfly, Dermatobia hominis,is the only species of botfly whose larvae ordinarily parasitize humans, though flies in some other families episodically …