Red-billed quelea parasites found in queleas include "Haemoproteus" and "Plasmodium". The red-billed quelea is caught and eaten in many parts of Africa. Around Lake Chad, three traditional methods are used to catch red-billed queleas. Trappers belonging to the Hadjerai tribe use triangular hand-held nets, which are both selective and efficient. Each team of six trappers caught about twenty thousand birds each night. An estimated five to ten million queleas are trapped near N'Djamena each year, representing a market value of approximately US$37,500–75,000. Between 13 June and 21 August 1994 alone, 1.2 million queleas were caught. Birds were taken from roosts in the
Red-billed quelea "aethiopica". Linnaeus himself did not explain the name "quelea". "Quelea quelea" is locally called "kwelea domo-jekundu" in Swahili, "enzunge" in Kwangali, "chimokoto" in Shona, "inyonyane" in Siswati, "thaha" in Sesotho and "ndzheyana" in the Tsonga language. M.W. Jeffreys suggested that the term came from medieval Latin "qualea", meaning "quail", linking the prodigious numbers of queleas to the hordes of quail that fed the Israelites during the Exodus from Egypt. The subspecies "lathamii" is probably named in honor of the ornithologist John Latham. The name of the subspecies "aethiopica" refers to Ethiopia, and its type was collected in the neighbouring Sennar