by A moose in Minnesota stumbles onto the street. It revolves, confused and dazed, unable to orientate itself or to recognize the risk of an oncoming semi -truck. What kills it is the effects of 13 tons of steel, but what causes her death is more complicated. Tunnels through her brain is a worm, which both did to die to fail.
Generally known as a brainworm, Parelaphostrongylus Tenuis is a parasitic nematode that infects a large selection of wild and domestic herbal blinds such as moose and moose. The worm can hike into the brain unsuspecting hosts, where it can cause catastrophic illness and death.
While the Minnesotani moose is a hypothetical example, this worm has caused serious neurological impairments in many animals. The symptoms of the disease can vary, from disorientation and circles to paralysis to the back end of the animal, the inability to get up and possibly die of death.
As a parasitologist, we examined the effects of these worms on the moose populations in Minnesota. By pursuing the spread of parasites and diseases in wild moose populations, wildlife managers can preserve these populations and reduce the spread to other animals or cattle breeding.
While White Wedelhirsche can accommodate these parasites without symptoms of illness, the worm can devastate the populations of hoofs such as moose and moose, which are not adapted to the parasite. And watching the disease in the wild is not easy.
The disease cycle
Weißwedelhirsche that accommodate these parasites can throw worms into their surroundings when they empty themselves. Snails and snails then absorb this larva, where it develops in them, to the point where it is able to infect other types of deer, moose, moose and cattle.
For us as a parasitologist, the greatest challenge is to recognize the disease before it irreversibly damages its landlord. Only white Wedelhirsche pass the parasite into your feces. This means that we cannot recognize this parasite by analyzing the Kot from moose or an animal next to the white -tailed deer.
The life cycle of the brainworm (Jesse Richards)
As soon as an animal is visible, it is too late to recover. Only after her death can we regain the body and identify the parasite from the place where he is embedded in the brain or the spinal cord.
Even if we have regained the body, it is time-consuming and often in vain to find a single, thread-shaped worm within the entirety of a moose or moose nervous system. Usually, wildlife biologists can only recognize that an animal has been infected by infected microscopic evidence that indicate that a parasite migrated by the central nervous system and analyzed by the analysis of DNA fragments that were left behind by the worm.
Diagnostic confusion
To make things even more difficult, disease signs caused by other worms, such as the arterial worm Elaeophora SchneideriTake a similar look at the brain worm and can influence Minnesota Elch. The arterial worm generally lives in the neck of black tail deer and mules. How P. TenuisThis parasite moves in the bodies of hosts that are not adapted to him and can harm.
Biologists who try to diagnose a wild moose, based on the visible clinical signs alone, can easily confuse and incorrectly conclude which parasites could have caused the disease. In view of the fact that the transfer of the parasites is very different, separate reduction steps are used to minimize the transmission.
And biologists who were diagnosed on the body of the animal on the basis of microscopic findings are still risking to incorrectly identify the worm. The best way to get a precise diagnosis is the genetic analysis – the analysis of the DNA sequence of the worm, which causes an illness. The DNA sequence will tell the researchers whether it is P. Tenuis or E. Schneideri.
Serological tests
While the genetic analysis can help researchers to monitor the existence of the disease in a population, you cannot use it to diagnose living animals. But our team has created a test with colleagues at the molecular diagnostic laboratory of the University of Tennessee College for Veterinary Medicine with which animals can be diagnosed while they are alive.
When an moose or a moose has a brainworm, its cells produce antibodies that are a kind of protein in the blood that try to defend themselves against the parasites. Our serological test is looking for these antibodies in the blood of an animal.
About the authors
Richard Gerhold is a professor of parasitology at the University of Tennessee.
Jessie Richards is a doctoral student in parasitology at the University of Tennessee.
This article will be released from the conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
In order to carry out the tests, wild health specialists collect blood from the sick or recently deceased animals and send it to the laboratory. There, scientists run part of the blood through a test that is looking for these specific antibodies P. TenuisThe animal is therefore not diagnosed incorrectly with a different type of parasite.
This test, with which the molecular diagnostic laboratory is now being sent from all over the country, helped us to monitor the populations of moose and moose for this parasite. It can recognize the presence of the parasite, while the animals are still alive and without expensive genetic tests.
Ripple effects through tests
After the elk from Minnesota from our example was hit by a semi -truck, Wildlife officials find the deceased moose on the side of the road and quickly take a sample of your blood to test. They send it to the University of Tennessee, where it connects thousands of other samples from Moose, Elch and even Karibu across North America.
Every submission helps our colleagues in the molecular diagnostic laboratory to improve the test. The test can also examine blood samples from animals that live in areas where researchers have not been discovered P. Tenuis. If these results are positive, these results can make biologists aware that the parasites extend into new areas and help them manage the population.
If a test in the molecular diagnostic laboratory indicates that the parasite is present in a new population at an early stage, you have more time to try to contain the distribution of illness. Wildlife managers can try to reduce snail and slug populations with controlled burns. Or you could increase how many deer hunters can harvest in the region in white fronds in order to reduce the deer population.
We hope that other researchers will use the techniques for this serological test in the future to carry out similar tests for other infectious diseases that contain RNA or DNA.
