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)

I don't think this is an ENGVAR thing either. Usually in insect name discussions, one word is used when it isn't actually a fly, etc. like dragonfly. In this case though, we actually are talking about flies, so that's why you'll see scientists separating the words like we do with bat bug. In the US, you'll often see similar iterations like that using the term horse fly as two words. Not a huge deal, but something like horsefly or horse-fly would technically be less correct, but horsefly or horse fly gets used pretty interchangeably. Horse-fly seems to be not so common though compared to the others. KoA (talk) 17:54, 15 March 2023 (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)

Hyphen?

Why the old-timey looking hyphen? Shouldn't it be "Horse fly" or "Horsefly?" Americanfreedom (talk) 16:05, 18 August 2022 (UTC)

Requested move 15 March 2023

• Horse-fly → Tabanidae
• Deer fly → Chrysops
• Chrysopsinae → Deer fly
• Tabaninae → Horse fly

I was working on trying to fix some naming errors related to taxonomy with article titles, but this got messy with multiple articles involved in the mix-ups, so doing this as an RM instead of manually because of all the existing redirects.

This move deals with article names related to horse and deer flies.[1][2] In short, the top level article that's currently Horse-fly isn't about horseflies, but instead about the entire family Tabanidae. The family includes horse flies among other groups and is incorrect and ambiguous under WP:COMMONNAME policy and WP:FAUNA as currently titled. We'd just be following the guidance and defaulting the the official scientific name for a title like we do when there's no clear common name like lady beetle/Coccinellidae. This group is typically referred to as horseflies and deerflies among other names in sources because there are multiple distinct groups within the family like Tabaninae/horse flies or Chrysopsinae/deer flies. No one name really satisfies a singular common name at that level of the taxonomy at least, and trying to pin down a common name at that level of the hierarchy messes up names for the distinct groups that do actually claim those names further down the line.

The second move is from additional confusion because the current article on deer fly does not go to Chrysopsinae as intended, but instead a much smaller group within that, Chrysops.

The third move then puts the actual deer flies (Chrysopsinae) under the correct common name and the fourth basically does the same for horse fly/Tabaninae, though that one already has horse fly redirecting to Tabaninae, so it'd just be a swap. The first two moves are higher priority to fix inaccurate titles though, but the last two just help make things a bit more standardized. KoA (talk) 18:29, 15 March 2023 (UTC)

Just a note I struck the last move. Tabaninae is the primary group that is called horse flies, but some of the other sub families like Pangoniinae I forgot about can have common names that include horse fly. The horse fly common name isn't as clear of a distinct group like deer flies, so probably better to just leave that one be. It seems like the horse fly variations can just redirect to Tabanidae instead with some added natural disambiguation, but that can be handled later since the others are a bit more pressing. KoA (talk) 19:10, 15 March 2023 (UTC)