Catch of the Day: Tapeworms and Trichurids

Article By Johnica Morrow

 

Tapeworms from Crotalus viridus

The second day of our 4th session here at Cedar Point was quite eventful for our Field Parasitology class.  The class performed a necropsy on a rattlesnake (Crotalus viridus) that was caught last Sunday morning by the Associate Director, Jon Garbish.  The class had certainly hoped to find parasites in this animal...a cestode, a nematode, a pentastome perhaps...but they had no idea just how lucky this catch had been.  As students gazed in anticipation, the intestines of the snake began to reveal a crowd of tapeworms.  The students watched in blissful wonder as their professor, Dr. Scott Gardner, carefully extracted these cestodes.  So far the class has been able to determine that these tapeworms belong to the order Proteocephalidea within the class Cestoda (which is under the phylum Platyhelminthes).  Over the course of the next few days, students will learn how these tapeworms are prepared, preserved, and identified.  

Tapeworms weren't the only thing crawling around in room 101 of the Gainsforth Resource Center.  The class also discovered four other types of worms from mammals they had collected, but let's not get too far ahead of ourselves. To collect parasites, one must first collect their hosts.  Keeping this in mind, students set out yesterday evening to attempt to catch small rodents in order to examine them for parasites.  As a class, the students set out 160 Sherman traps in lines that radiated through the main campus of the station.  Upon checking these traps this morning, the students found and processed 19 animals.  They caught voles (Microtus pennsylvanicus) and deer mice (Peromyscus leucopus).  So far, none of the students have documented the presence of parasites from their voles, but many types of helminths were recorded from the deer mice.  Today, these mice yielded whipworms (Trichuris peromysci), pinworms (Syphacia peromysci), tapeworms (Catenotaenia peromysci), and bot flies (Cuterebra castrator).

Dr. Scott Gardner holding
the rattlesnake's tapeworms.

These great findings seem all the more impressive when one realizes that this work was done in a single class period.  The class is off to a great start with two days of this session down.  Students are learning that setting traps, performing necropsies, preparing specimens, and identifying species is all in a day's work for a field parasitologist!  

One of the most exciting things about field-based classes are their fluidity.  To properly teach a class in a field setting the students and the instructor have to be prepared to roll with the punches.  You never know what sorts of biodiversity you will be working with from day to day when you are collecting any sorts of animals, especially internal and external parasites.  It will be interesting to see what the next few weeks will bring!