Parasite of the Day

In the ocean, squids occupy a sort of middle position in the food web. While they are voracious predators that attack anything that moves, t...

Earlier this year, I wrote about Aggregata sinensis   a species of single-celled apicomplexan parasite that infects octopus. But octopuses a...

Gnathiidae is a family of parasitic isopods that can be considered as ticks of the sea. I make that comparison not only because gnathiids a...

Fish blood flukes are common parasites in the aquatic environment and many species have been described from all kinds of fish all over the ...

Today we're featuring a guest post by Darragh Casey - a student from 4th year class of the Applied Freshwater and Marine Biology' de...

A few months ago I wrote a Dispatch   for Current Biology about a newly published study on Anelasma squalicola  - a parasitic barnacle that...

In June 2010 at Folly Beach, South Carolina, the local community was shocked and dismayed by the sight of millions of dead dwarf surf clams ...

As has been discussed in a number of previous posts,  most parasites don't get the whole host to themselves and often have to compete w...

Today, we are featuring a paper which reported on a grey reef shark ( Carcharhinus amblyrhynchos ) at Burger's Zoo in the Netherlands ...

The parasite for today is found in a celebrity of sorts, the star of the film Jaws and its sequels - the famous Great White Shark . Unlike i...

On this blog, we've had all kinds of blood-suckers - leeches, bats, ticks, and lice. But when it comes to vampirism, a snail doesn't...

Crossobothrium antonioi is a species of tapeworm that was just described last year after finding it in the broadnose sevengill shark ( Noto...

This parasite was almost one that was featured for Halloween - you'll see why soon - before worms in the eyes of giant birds and blood-...

My what big teeth you have! That might be scarier if they weren't on a stomach nematode, but rather the creature that it lives inside. ...

Nybelinia surmenicola is another tapeworm parasite that infects the salmon shark, Lamna ditropis . The sharks get these parasites when the...

The parasite Ommatokoita elongata probably made a few of you squeamish. If so, then you probably want to just close this page, too. Cali...

On the whole, digenean trematodes aren’t very common in sharks. Parasitologists learn early that tapeworms rule the sharks, and trematodes ...

Dinemoleus indeprensus is a parasitic copepod which is in the same family as Pandarus rhincodonicus (the whale shark ectoparasite), howeve...

The host for today's parasite is the mighty whale shark ( Rhincodon typus ). Pandarus rhincodonicus is parasitic copepod which lives on...

Guitarfish are really rays, not sharks, but they're closely related and some species are also called sand sharks, so thought this one c...