July 10 -New gregarine sp.

Dragonflies and damselfies are attractive creatures, yet they too have parasites! These include gregarines, which live in the intestine. Gregarines are single celled parasites known as apicomplexans, a group that also includes Plasmodium species, which cause malaria. Gregarines parasitize all sorts of invertebrates, such as oysters, beetles, earthworms, harvestmen, and a variety of insects. There are very likely tens of thousands, if not more, undiscovered species of gregarines in nature. For example, we recently found a new species of gregarine in the Eastern fork-tail damselfly in upstate New York, shown in this image. The star-like structure, the epimerite, is used to attach to the intestinal wall. We are now working on describing this new species.

Post and photo contributed by Crystal Wiles and Florian Reyda.

July 9 - Haemogregarina macrochelysi

If you are thinking about swimming in a southern pond make sure you don't let your feet dangle...they might get chomped by an alligator snapping turtle (Macrochelys temminckii) - one of the meanest creatures you can come across. Maybe they are mean because they're often covered with leeches sucking their blood - and sometimes those leeches can transmit blood parasites, such as today's parasite, Haemogregarina macrochelysi, a new species of hemogregarine (another distant relative of malaria, Babesia and Toxoplasma). The authors of the paper reported that every single alligator snapping turtle they sampled from seven different locations had these parasites.

Photo by Sam Telford, Jr., the primary author of the paper.

July 8 - Nephroisospora eptesici

Not only are we still discovering new species of parasites, sometimes we're finding whole new genera. Today's parasite is one such example. Nephroisospora eptesici is a new species of coccidian parasite that was recently found in the kidneys of big brown bats (Eptisecus fuscus) in Minnesota. Bats that had been submitted for rabies testing were found to have macroscopic lesions on their kidneys (shown in photo) and subsequent analyses using histology of the lesions as well as DNA sequencing confirmed that they were coccidia. However, these parasites are very unusual in that they appear to undergo their entire life cycle in just one host - all of their relatives use two hosts. The discovery of sporocysts within the kidneys also was perplexing to the authors as other relatives (Isospora, Eimeria, Toxoplama) need oxygen to produce these stages.

The original species description, where the photo is from can be found here.

July 7 - Hysterothylacium burtti

Anasakid nematodes in the genus Hysterothylacium are known to be quite diverse in fish worldwide, however just three species use North American freshwater fish as hosts and, until recently, none had ever been found infecting amphibians. H. burtti was recently found infected red-spotted newts (Notophthalmus viridescens) in Pennsylvania. The infected newts were found in ponds that did not contain any fish, thus it doesn't seem that they are just "spillover" or accidental hosts, but it is certainly possible that this species recently infected fish. Newts and fish such as sunfish consume many of the same prey items (which are intermediate hosts), so a host switch is certainly possible.

July 6 - Cardicola nonamo

The next in our week of "All American" parasites is Cardicola nonamo, a bloodfluke, which is a species of digenetic trematode that infects the hearts of two species of seaperches - the white seaperch and the (I love this name) rubberlip seaperch - off the coast of California. Despite the fact that this species was only described this year, the type specimens were collected back in 1936 and 1980. Ash Bullard, the scientist from Auburn University, who published the paper, named the species after a conglomeration of the names of the three people who had first collected it: Nobel; Nahhas; and Moser.

Image comes from the original species description.

July 5 - Pristicola bruchi

Pristicola bruchi is a new species of trematode parasite that was recently discovered in lake sturgeon (Acipenser fulvescens) in Wisconsin. The intermediate hosts are not known yet, but based on related taxa and the food web in this ecosystem, oligochaetes are likely candidates. The discovery of this species now begins to shed light on the biogeography of sturgeon parasites. There are now three genera that each have two representative species - one in Eurasia and one in North America, suggesting a very ancient vicariant event, perhaps as old as the Cretaceous.

Image is from the original species description, published in 2009.

July 4 - Babesia uriae

Recently, you met Babesia microti, an Apicomplexan parasite that is sometimes affectionately referred to as "Montauk malaria" because of it's presence in the Northeast and the fact that it causes a disease much like malaria in people who become infected via tick bites. Today's parasite is Babesia uriae, a species that infect birds - in this case, the murre, from California. Two birds were found to be infected after having been brought into wildlife rehabilitation centers. The parasites appear to cause pathology in these birds and based on both morphological differences and molecular data were determined to be a new species. This was the first time that a species of Babesia was found in the family Alcidae (the auks). Currently, the vectors are not known.

Photo by Michael Yabsley, one of the discoverers of this species.

July 3 - Raillietina cesticillus

Raillietina cesticillus is a common tapeworm of chickens and other poultry. The intermediate hosts of this worm, beetles but sometimes even houseflies, eat the eggs of the tapeworm, where they develop into cysticercoids. The chicken then consumes the insects while it is foraging. Large numbers can infect a single bird, as shown in the photo.

The image comes from this site.

July 2 - Argas persicus

Argas persicus is a species of soft-bodied tick (Argasidae) that is common on chickens and other poultry. They like to hide in the wooden parts of the coops and then crawl onto the birds to feed. They can vector a species of bacteria called Borrelia anserina, which produces avian spirochetosis. Soft-bodied ticks aren't really so soft - they just are called that since they look rather shriveled until they fill themselves up with blood.

The image comes from this site.

July 1 - Rhopalura ophiocomae

Rhopalura ophiocomae is a member of a very small, very obscure, and very enigmatic group of parasites that are part of a phylum called Orthonectida. They are multicellular organisms but lack both gastrointestinal tracts and nervous systems. This species infects brittlestars and will invade the gonads and castrate their hosts. The larvae are ciliated and invade new brittlestars via entering the genital clefts of those echinoderms. Inside this host, they essentially disintegrate to form an amoeboid structure called a plasmodium. A phylogenetic analysis based on the 18S genes of this species and several multicellular organisms and protists showed that these parasites were more closely related to triploblast organisms, but were not allied with anything else in the tree. Clearly someone needs to do some more work on this group!

The image comes from this site.