Nematode Parasiter of Vertebrates: Their Development and Transmission (2nd Edition)

Abstract

It is hoped this book will be of practical use to parasitologists, physicians, veterinarians, zoologists, and wildlife and fisheries biologists and that it will encourage a fresh appreciation of the astonishing diversity of ‘life styles’ even within superfamilies often regarded as biologically homogeneous. For example, the trichostrongyloids range from the typical gut parasite with the usual free-living larvae, to species which are transmitted by emesis and others which live in bile ducts and mammary glands of their hosts. The lungworms (metastrongyloids) range from typical inhabitants of the lungs which use molluscs as intermediate hosts, to forms in which first-stage larvae passed in faeces or vomit are the infective stage. In the dracunculoids of marine fish are found species in which first-stage larvae are microfilarioid and occur in the blood, where they are available to blood-sucking crustacean intermediate hosts – a remarkable convergence with the distantly related filarioids of terrestrial vertebrates. In the filarioids transmission ranges from the Filariidae, which release eggs into the environment by means of a break in the skin, to louse-transmitted, ephemeral Onchocercidae, which flood the skin of shorebirds with long-lived microfilariae and then disappear.