#trematode

fasciola hepatica under the microscope ૮ ˶ᵔ ᵕ ᵔ˶ ა

What’s interesting about this new digenean parasite is that the larvae cooperate using two different forms. The DNA confirmed that both the sailors and tiny passengers inside the hemisphere belong to the same species. These passengers, it seems, act as the infectious agents, waiting to infiltrate the gills or intestines of a fish that swallows them. The sailors, meanwhile, do the hard work of moving the blob through the water—but in sacrifice their own opportunities to reproduce. This phenomenon, in which one member of a species forgoes its own chance to reproduce so that another can, is called kin selection. And this, says Robert Poulin, a parasitologist at the University of Otago who was not involved, is “a really cool case of kin selection pushed to the extreme.” Scientists have studied the phenomenon in other kinds of trematode parasites while they are living inside their hosts. The “remarkable” new study shows that this division of labor happens in free-living larval forms as well, says Ryan Hechinger, a marine biologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. “This finding highlights that trematodes are unique among all animal life.”

So called rattenkönig “RAT KING”, bundles of living, undulating, floating, trematode fish parasites, usually excreted by intermediary hosts such as snails. 

Phylum: Platyhelminthes

Class: Trematoda

Heterophyes heterophyes

...is a parasitic species of Heterophyid trematode that is commonly found in Northern Africa and most of Asia and Indonesia. Adult H. heterophyes will live burrowed between the villi of their host's small intestines, their hosts are typically fish-eating birds and mammals (including humans). H. heterophyes eggs will not hatch until they have been ingested by a snail (usually Pirenella conica in Africa or Cerithidia cingula in Asia) once inside the snails gut the eggs will hatch and become a sporocyst which will produce rediae, which in turn produce cercariae which will exit the snail and swim towards the surface of the water and fall back down. On their way down they will attempt to come in contact with a fish and penetrate their tissue, from here the cercariae will enycst in the muscle tissue until the fish is eaten.

Classification

Animalia-Platyhelminthes-Trematoda-Opisthorchiida-Heterophyidae-Heterophyes-H. heterophyes

MY FIRST PUBLISHED WORK!

My microscope photograph of the parasitic flatworm Haematoloechus longiplexus inside the lungs of a bullfrog has been featured in a textbook by Cambridge University Press!

Many thanks to Dr. Tim Goater at Vancouver Island University for providing me with the opportunity, as well as the bullfrog lungs.