49 
THE CONGO FLOOR MAGGOT 
A BLOOD-SUCKING DIPTEROUS LARVA FOUND IN THE CONGO FREE STATE 
{The First Interim Report of the Expedition of the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine 
to the Congo, 1903. Received January, 1904) 
BY 
J. EVERETT BUTTON, M.B., Vict. 
WALTER MYERS FELLOW, UNIVERSITY OF LIVERPOOL 
J. L. TODD, B.A., M.D., CM., McGill 
AND 
CUTHBERT CHRISTY, M.B., Edin. 
IN correspondence, during our stay at Boma, with the Rev. Holman Bentley 
and Mr. Sutton Smith, both of the Baptist Missionary Society Corporation, 
we learned of the existence in the Lower Congo of what were called ' floor 
maggots,' which they described as ' keen blood-suckers.' 
It was not, however, until camped at a place called Nkanga, on our way from 
Tumba to Lutete, in the cataract region of the Congo, that we had an opportunity 
of seeing specimens of these maggots. Here, the head man of a neighbouring 
village, after being questioned on the subject of native pests, collected for us during 
the night, a number of what appeared to us — at first sight — to be ordinary blow-fly 
maggots. On a closer inspection many of them were seen to contain bright red 
blood. 
A day or two afterwards, when visiting a native village, we had the opportunity 
of seeing the natives collect these blood-suckers by digging with the point of a knife 
or scraping with a sharpened stick in the dust-filled cracks and crevices of the mud 
floors of their huts. We were soon able to find them ourselves as easily as the 
natives, and unearthed many larvae which contained bright red blood. In collecting 
them the natives selected those huts in which the occupants slept on floor mats, saying 
that where people slept on beds or raised platforms the maggots were not so 
numerous. They informed us, however, that those who slept in beds which were 
not raised more than eighteen inches from the ground were also bitten, and credited 
the maggot with the power of jumping to that height. In some of the huts we 
collected, in a short space of time, as many as twenty from only a small proportion 
of the floor crevices. Many were turned up from a depth of three inches. In some 
of the cracks, and in moist, soft earth, they were found at greater depths. There is 
H 
