I heard that maggots live in the nasal cavities of moose. Is that true? I don't really buy into it but you never know, it is an awful big area up there.
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I was skinning it, I found one in each nasal cavity. Talk about yucko! They were about an inch long and maybe 3/8" thick. I told the guy about them. He said the deer kept shaking its head before he shot it. I can imagine why......eeeeewwwwwww!
Over the years,At the hunting preserve, I have seen hundreds of Barbarosa,Corsican,Mouflon,ETC sheep.After they are harvested,and the skull plates are sawed off, up deep in the sinus between the horn cores, larva like the kind mentioned.Some have them,some do not.But it is common and dose not seem like it is harming the animals other than the discomfort.
Michael/Ohio
I think they are called. They live inside of the nasal cavity.
Seen blow fly larvae (maggots) in nasal openings before, and while cleaning a whale carcass I had a fly lay an egg mass in MY nose. My hands and arms were covered in whale goo so I couldnt wipe or blow them out til about an hour later... so maggots in a moose nose? I can see that for sure...
These are bot flies , not blow flies . Bot flies lay eggs in living tissue , blow flies go for dead stuff . You will find this a lot in warmer weather ( summer ) than the fall . There are different species of bot flies for each mammal . Some are deer bot flies , sheep bot and even rabbit bot flies . Believe it or not , there are 20,000 species of flies in North America , I have a book with all the species . I found these in a road kill deer during the summer and they are nasty looking and large . Rick
The moose head I saw the blow flies in was dead... the flies from the whale I was working on were house flies.... thousands.. of house flies - and a hundred times that in maggots; it was unbelievable!
Thanks for the clarification Rick =) In re-reading my post it did look like I was saying they were blow flies, when in fact I was just making a comparison that I had seen blow flies in things before (not necessarily in living moose snouts - hehe), so encountering maggots in general in a nasal opening wouldn't surprise me.
I tell ya tho - I feel sorry for those moose.. having eggs in my nose for an hour was bad enough.. having actual maggots crawling around up there? no thanks...
All cervidae carry them. They are quite a neat story, feeding on mucus membranesin the nasal cavity, being coughed up and ingested and pooped back out. Others actually feed along the brain lining, like brainworm. Thats how WT deer carry it unaffected, yet pass it onto moose, to which its fatal.
I had a three legged wild deer that used to lay along the fence of my deer pen. Every day he was there. One day after he walked off so I could feed the deer, I saw a full sized larvae laying on the snow next to his bed, that hed coughed up. Same nasty old grub that youll often see when caping deer. We treat our deer with Ivermectin and other drugs just for these types of parasites.
From the nasal bot, that climbs out and bite like hell, to some very very small ones.
You can do a search on google and find a lot of info.