These photographs show a human botfly being surgically removed from a boy's eyeball.
Female botflies capture mosquitoes and attach their eggs to the mosquitoes body. They then release it. Eventually the mosquito makes its way to an animal and bites it, inserting the eggs while it feeds on the blood. The eggs then gestate under the skin and hatch as a larva. The larvae develop within the subcutaneous layers for up to eight weeks before they drop out and pupate beneath the soil.
This is one of the only known examples of a botfly infecting a human eye. The case study was first published in the July 2000 issue of Archives of Ophthalmology, and explains:
"A 5-YEAR-OLD boy with inferior orbital swelling and an erythematous mass arising from the inferior cul-de-sac of his right eye (Figure 1 and Figure 2 to the right) was seen by an Air Force Mobile Ophthalmic Surgical Team working in a rural area of the Republic of Honduras. The respiratory pore of a late-stage larva of the human botfly (Dermatobia hominis) was located in the anterior orbit. The larva was gently removed under general anesthesia through a small incision in the conjunctiva (Figure 3, Figure 4, and Figure 5 to the right)."
