246 Records of the Indian Museum. [Vol.. IX, 



introduced into India at the beginning of the nineteenth century 

 (see Burkill, Rec. Bot. Surv. India IV, No. 6, p. 297; 1911) and 

 there is no plant with similarly arranged thorns indigenous in 

 Orissa. I failed to find a single individual of the fly on walls near 

 the cactus hedge on which it was common, and it was absent even 

 from stems of the (imported) cactus Cereus and of an indigenous 

 thorny Euphorbiaceous plant ; the bunches of thorns on these plants 

 being arranged in vertical lines on a polygonal stem instead of 

 being scattered on a flattened and expanded one. 



N. Ann AND ALE. 



Indian Blood-Sucking Midges. — If we restrict the term 

 '•midges," as seems legitimate, to the subfamily Culicoidinae or 

 Ceratopogoninae of the family Chironomidae or Tendipedidae, the 

 number of blood-sucking midges for which the habit has been 

 authenticated in India is extremely small, and all that have been 

 proved to exercise it in this country belong to the genus Culicoides , 

 Latr., in which the mouth parts are similarly developed in the 

 two sexes. Dr. Kiei^er has recentl}^ described a considerable num- 

 ber of Indian and Ceylonese representatives of the genus in the 

 Memoirs (vol. ii ; 1910) and Records of the Indian Museum (vols, 

 vi ; 1911 and ix ; 1913) and in vol. viii of Spolia Zeylanica (1912). 

 Of these species only the following are actually known to suck 

 mammalian blood : — 



1. Culicoides molestus^ 3. Culicoides himalayae^ 



2. Culicoides oxystomaf 4. Culicoides peregrinus* 



Of these the first two species were found sucking that of cattle 

 and deer in the Calcutta Zoological Garden in March, 1908. 



C. himalavae was originally described from Kurseong (June, 

 1910) and other specimens have recently been sent to the Museum 

 by Mr. H. Stevens, who took them at Kaliponni on the Nepal- 

 Sikkim frontier at an altitude of about 9000 feet. He refers to 

 them as " blood-sucking flies of a particularly venomous nature." 



The type-specimens of C. peregrinus were taken at Puri on 

 the coast of Orissa in March. I recently (July, 19 13) found the 

 species very abundant in a bungalow near Balugaon in the same 

 district. One individual was killed in the act of biting my wrist, 

 and I had reason to think that many others were attacking my 

 ankles. The irritation was considerable but not lasting and very 

 little swelling followed the bite. Both sexes swarmed at night in 

 the corners of rooms, particularly in the neighbourhood of a 

 lighted lamp ; females were much commoner than males. 



Mr. F. H. Gravel}^, to whom I am indebted for the identifica- 

 tion, by comparison with the types, of Mr. Stevens' examples of 

 C. himalayae, has recorded a curious habit of an undetermined 



1 Kieffer, Mem. Ind. Miis. ii, p. 193, pi. viii, fig. 9. 



2 Id., ibid., p. 193. pi. ix, fig. i. '^ Id., Rec. Ind. Mus. vi, p. 326. 

 * Id., Mem. Ind. Mus. ii, p. 191, pi. viii, fig. i. 



