User:Sshirmast/sandbox

Electrovermis zappumis fish blood fluke. It is very common in aquatic environments and is found in many types of fish all around the world. The adult parasite is very common fish hosts unlike the asexual stage living in the invertebrate host which is very rare. Electrovermis Zappum lives in the heart of an electric ray and spends part of its lifetime in a clam.

This worm is 1.5 mm long. Half of the worm is just its reproductive organs, which produce eggs. The eggs that get out the ray's body hatched into larvae that are covered in celia, called miracidia. The miracidia then infects a coquina clam.

Once that happens the miracidia enters it's asexual stage of the life cycle. Then it turns into many sporocysts that take over the clams body. In each sporocyst there is 6 larvae called cercariae. The cercariae continue to grow until they are ready ready to be released into the water.

An infected clam can hold upto several hundred sporocyts that completely take over the clam. The clam now just serves to help multiply and release infected fluke larvae which are released into the surrounding water. The coquina clam and the Electric ray both live in the same zone in the ocean so when the cercariae are released the ray's are right there where they are next used as the host.

The majority of the cercariae will be eaten by other marine animals or they will die because they run out of run out of energy reserves before they get to an electric ray, but enough of them will get to an electric ray to continue the life cycle. When a cercariae comes into contact with a ray it will burrow it's tail into the skin of the electric ray and penetrate to the blood vessel. Then it will travel through the fish's circulatory system until it eventually reaches the heart. Then it starts a new cycle there.

It only takes a small number of infected clams to to maintain a viable population of the parasites in ray hosts. the infected beach clams were extremely rare. Out of the 1174 clams viewed only 6 were infected. On beaches where the coquina clam are are found each square meter of beach is densely packed with thousands of coquina clams which makes it extremely difficult to find the infected clams. Usually other flukes infect snails but this one is unique because it infects clams.

Reference: http://dailyparasite.blogspot.com/