ABSTRACT
Despite their painful bites, these bugs must be considered beneficial because they often feed on dipteran larvae. Immatures of several families of noxious Diptera have been used as food in rearing experiments. Sites and Nichols (1990) reared
Ambrysus lunatus
Usinger on larvae of
Prosimulium
sp. (Simuliidae), Hungerford (1927) fed
Pelocoris femoratus
Palisot de Beauvois on mosquito (Culicidae) and midge (Chironomidae) larvae, and McPherson et al. (1987) reared
P. femoratus
on
Chaoborus
sp. (Chaoboridae) larvae. In feeding trials, Clarke and Baroudy (1990) showed that
Laccocoris limigenus
(Stål) prefers midge larvae to oligochaetes. Several papers cite
Ilyocoris cimicoides
(L.) as feeding on mosquito larvae and pupae (i.e., Eysell 1905, Hamlyn-Harris 1929), including
Anopheles
sp. (Federici 1920). Wladimirow and Smirnov (1932) found that
I. cimicoides
would consume eight mosquito larvae per day.
