from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
- n. Plural form of tsetse.
Sorry, no etymologies found.
As we drove farther down the track, the tsetses were amassing into a black cloud behind the truck.
The tsetses mainly depend on a supply of blood, and in a tsetse-infested country these insects follow the herds of wild animals and feed on them.
A few years ago an experiment was tried in Tanganyika Territory; a considerable area was, as far as possible, cleared of wild life, and the tsetses, deprived of the food usually supplied by game, concentrated on the natives living in the area; within a few months an epidemic of sleeping sickness appeared, and several hundred people died.
It will, therefore, be realized that the tsetses are more dangerous than the house fly which is so often the agent for the spread of typhoid.
But tsetses are not the only dipteran foes of zebra and, since they are rarely found in the meadows of Hungary, Dr Horvath plumped for studying an almost equally obnoxious alternative: the horsefly.