Talk:Tabanidae

Commentary for Behavioral Ecology Class

The entry is abundant in terms of the topics it covers. The images are informative, relevant, and easy to view. The tone is academic and neutral, limiting bias. The entry is does not seem to contain any original research, heavily citing references. One thing I learned that was most interesting to me was that the female must have a blood meal before she can reproduce, so the female bites animals to gain this blood (and the stings are very painful). andrewoh29 (talk) 18:53, 12 September 2019 (UTC)

Reference to Literature in the Stub?

Should the reference to horseflies in literature be included in the article summary? Would a section for literature or popular culture be better? If the reference is left in the summary we should look for non Western myth or reference to include as well. Jgmac1106 (talk) 13:13, 17 July 2019 (UTC)

Hyphenation

Whether the subject of the article should be hyphenated appears doubtful; compare the selection of dictionaries offering "horse-fly" with those offering "horsefly". WolfmanSF (talk) 15:12, 16 September 2015 (UTC)

I believe it should not be hyphenated. There should be a single space. In entomological common names, the convention is that if the organism is a fly (that is, it belongs to the order Diptera), then the word "fly" should be separated from the rest of the name by a space (e.g. house fly, horse fly, hover fly, etc.). If the organism is NOT a fly, then the word "fly" should be combined with the rest of the name (e.g. scorpionfly, dragonfly, damselfly, mayfly). This is how I was taught in all of my entomological courses and it is the same convention followed by bugguide.net. ArachnoGBH (talk) 21:47, 4 November 2016 (UTC)

References

Where to mention one-word spelling?

I know this article is in British English, but surely the American spelling (I think) horsefly should also be mentioned, either as a second option in the first sentence, or somewhere in the "Common names" section.

I would prefer the first option, as is often done for words that vary between varieties of English, also because it seems a little awkward to shoehorn it into "Common names", which is about other names, not other spellings.

I'd do it myself, but I'm slightly unsure whether this is really an ENGVAR difference, or just a free stylistic variation, and the wording might be a little different in the two cases. --Trovatore (talk) 02:29, 24 June 2016 (UTC)

Well, the singular name isn't there but the plural names "horse-flies" and "horseflies" are, and I think that is sufficient. I don't think it is an ENGVAR matter, just a lack of consistency on hyphenating words across Wikipedia. Cwmhiraeth (talk) 06:17, 13 September 2019 (UTC)

Strange - according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the spelling is horsefly, without a hyphen!!! Regards Denisarona (talk) 08:07, 13 September 2019 (UTC)

Dracula flies

We called them Dracula Flies when I was young, in Ireland. My family use this name today. Nmclough (talk) 19:02, 25 June 2020 (UTC)