In a small isolated lake in Slovakia, the fish acanthocephalan Pomphorhynchus laevis using Gammarus balcanicus and the minnow Phoxinus phoxinus, respectively, as its intermediate and final hosts, represented a dominant helminth species. Its prevalence and intensity of infection in fish showed no significant variation during a year fluctuating above the mean values of 89% and 6.6 worms per fish....

We examined the associations between intestinal helminth infracommunity structure and infection parameters and the age, size, and year and region of collection of 130 female lesser scaup (Aythya affinis) during their 2014-2015 spring migrations through the upper Midwest, USA. We identified a total of 647,174 individual helminths from 40 taxa, including 20 trematodes, 14 cestodes, 4 nematodes an...

Twenty-eight hog-nosed skunks (Conepatus leuconotus), 23 striped skunks (Mephitis mephitis), and nine spotted skunks (Spilogale gracilis) from an area of sympatry in west-central Texas were examined for helminth parasites. Shared helminth species among all three host species were one nematode (Physaloptera maxillaris), two acanthocephalans (Pachysentis canicola, Macracanthorhynchus ingens), and...

Patterns of host use by parasites throughout a guild community of intermediate hosts can depend on several biological and ecological factors, including physiology, morphology, immunology, and behavior. We looked at parasite transmission in the intertidal crustacean community of Lower Portobello Bay, Dunedin, New Zealand, with the intent of: (1) mapping the flow of parasites throughout the major...

Species of Pseudocorynosoma are North and South American acanthocephalans that use waterfowl as definitive hosts and amphipods as intermediate hosts, whereas species of Andracantha occur in fish-eating birds with a worldwide distribution. Pseudocorynosoma and Andracantha were originally described as Corynosoma (now restricted to endoparasites of marine mammals). Morphologically, Andracantha is ...

From August 2011 to November 2013, 68 opossums (8 Didelphis sp., 40 Didelphisvirginiana, 15 Didelphismarsupialis, and 5 Philanderopossum) were collected in 18 localities from 12 Mexican states. A total of 12,188 helminths representing 21 taxa were identified (6 trematodes, 2 cestodes, 3 acanthocephalans and 10 nematodes). Sixty-six new locality records, 9 new host records, and one species, the ...

BACKGROUND Corvidae is a cosmopolitan family of oscine birds including crows, rooks, magpies, jays, chough, and ravens. These birds are migratory species, especially in the shortage of foods, so they can act like vectors for a wide range of microorganisms. They live generally in temperate climates and in a very close contact with human residential areas as well as poultry farms. There is no ava...

Parasites affect host behavior in several ways. They can alter activity, microhabitats or both. For trophically transmitted parasites (the focus of our study), decreased activity might impair the ability of hosts to respond to final-host predators, and increased activity and altered microhabitat choice might increase contact rates between hosts and final-host predators. In an analysis of trophi...

Some larval helminths alter the behavior of their intermediate hosts in ways that favor the predation of infected hosts, thus enhancing trophic transmission. Gammarids (Crustacea: Amphipoda) offer unique advantages for the study of the proximate factors mediating parasite-induced behavioral changes. Indeed, amphipods infected by distantly related worms (acanthocephalans, cestodes and trematodes...