The paper “Novel insight into the genetic diversity of strongylid nematodes infecting South-East and East Asian primates” published in Parasitology is freely available to read online.…
Circadian rhythms are timekeeping mechanisms responsible for the cyclic repetition of metabolic, behavioural and psychological processes in all living organisms, typically over a 24-hour period.
Climate change could shift where invasive plant species establish hotspots, and certain U.S. states could be negatively impacted without a rapid response plan.
We would like to thank all our reviewers for their pro bono services to Parasitology in 2023, to our authors and to science in general.
This paper focuses on the biodiversity and ecology of specific trophically transmitted helminth endoparasites (TTHs) in Mediterranean Sea ecosystems.
Recently published research in the journal Weed Science provides new mechanistic insights into S-metolachlor resistance in waterhemp.
We investigate parasite guilds within and between squid cohorts. 318 squids were examined for metazoan parasites in the Patagonian continental shelf.
The hookworm A. ceylanicum doesn't infect mice but does to other animals. We hypothesized that the immune system is the deciding factor for hookworm infections.
In support of Mariana Carrito and colleague’s article, When he smiles: Attractiveness preferences for male faces expressing emotions. Facial attractiveness has long been a subject of curiosity and study, with scientists attempting to unravel the complex factors that influence our perception of beauty.…
Identifying the factors that drive homicide rates is not only of paramount interest to scholars across the social and behavioral sciences but is necessary to inform policy decisions aimed at reducing lethal aggression. Studies nominate diverse causes of homicide, including ambient temperature, city greenness, firearm ownership, firearm laws, structural racism, income inequality, poverty, and more. However, without general theory scholars struggle to disentangle causal factors from correlated effects. This distinction is vitally important for designing interventions that target underlying causes rather than spurious correlations.
The increasing use of the in vitro gas production technique has created a greater scope for testing animal feeds. The rationale for this paper was the additional requirement of researchers in the field of feed evaluation to compare substrate treatment significance.
The journal Parasitology is delighted to announce the winner of this year's front cover competition.
Lactation, a minority period (15-19%) of the sow's productive cycle, is a period of maximum digestive and metabolic demand since in a few days (two weeks at most) the sow multiplies its production level by three.
Climate change is a big concern for wheat crop in Australia. We look at the relationship between weather parameters and grain number, yield and protein content.
This systematic review analyzed the diversity of metastrongyles in marine mammals and the host and parasite traits associated with virulence.
Lodgewood pine are weeds that quickly outcompete local flora. New Zealand has launched The National Wilding Conifer Management Programme to manage the problem.
Parasitologists have discovered 2 cases of grey seals infected with heartworms in the North Sea.
In this work we show that LRR17, a secreted Leishmania protein never reported before, facilitates parasite attachment and internalization by the macrophage.
When Richard Burton and John Speke came across Lake Tanganyika in 1858 as the first Europeans, they had no idea what they had just discovered.
Prof Pier Luigi Nimis is an outstanding lichenologist and ecologist. To mark his 70th birthday, The Lichenologist published a Special Issue dedicated to him.
Is human cultural diversity partly shaped by the diversity of environments in which human societies live? Finding that a particular cultural feature is significantly associated with specific environmental variables adds weight to an argument that human diversity is shaped by environment. For example, many aspects of human cultural diversity have been found to correlate with parasite load, and these correlations have been interpreted as support for the hypothesis that cultures with high pathogen load develop features that limit the chance of infection, such as ritualized behaviours, xenophobia, belief in supernatural agents, and inclusion of antimicrobial ingredients in food.
Last month Cambridge University Press & Assessment (CUPA) announced the first sponsorship of a question in its innovative Research Directions: One Health journal.…
Challenging the popular but problematic 'Five Domains model' approach to categorising the experiences of animals in animal welfare science.
The Irish Society for Parasitology organises a vibrant annual meeting for parasitologists to come together and share their research and build collaborations.…
This research enhances our understanding of the Echinococcus granulosus complex and its impact on human health.
Researchers have developed a tool that can distinguish specimens of common reed reliably in the field, without time-consuming and costly genetic testing.
The latest Paper of the Month for Parasitology is “Rat lungworm (Angiostrongylus cantonensis) active larval emergence from deceased bubble pond snails (Bullastra lessoni) into water” and is freely available. …
As evolutionary human scientists, we care about causality. We usually want to know whether something causes something else, rather than whether things are just correlated. We want to know whether aspects of our culture, social structure or ecology cause a given behaviour, as opposed to being merely associated with it, for instance. Experiments are the gold standard for assessing causality, but for obvious reasons cannot answer everything, especially many of the evolutionary questions we’re interested in – Randomising infants to be raised as religious or not, for instance, would be both impossible and ethically questionable (to put it mildly!).
In Parasitology's latest article, we reveal the genetic identity for one of the last Echinococcus isolates in Iceland, obtained from a sheep 46 years ago.
A new paper in BCI reveals that 38% of Europe’s 546 bird species are of conservation concern, including 14% of global concern.…
Professor Richard Kock, Editor-in-Chief of Research Directions: One Health, recently launched by Cambridge University Press, explains why a broad concept of health and well-being is essential.…
What is your current job title within Parasitology and what does it involve? Where are you based in the world? I’m the Publisher at Cambridge University Press for Parasitology.…
The latest Paper of the Month for Parasitology is Comparative transcriptomics from intestinal cells of permissive and non-permissive hosts during Ancylostoma ceylanicum infection reveals unique signatures of protection and host specificity and is freely available. …
Organically produced sweetpotato crops can be significantly more profitable than those grown in conventional production systems. But it’s not all smooth sailing. Growers know it can be tough to manage weed infestations in the absence of synthetic herbicides.
The latest Paper of the Month for Parasitology is “First report of eprinomectin-resistant isolates of Haemonchus contortus in dairy sheep farms in France“ and is freely available for one month. …
Martyn Dade-Robertson, Editor-in-Chief of Research Directions: Biotechnology Design, explains more about this emerging branch of science Can we grow a building?…
Buffelgrass is a highly invasive perennial that reduces the biodiversity of native ecosystems and provides ready fuel for wildfires in the arid regions where it thrives. After examining a decade of data from Arizona’s Saguaro National Park, researchers writing in the journal Invasive Plant Science and Management describe best practices for buffelgrass control.
The latest Paper of the Month for Parasitology is “Immunological mechanisms involved in macrophage activation and polarization in schistosomiasis” and is freely available.…
Professor Tomonori Totani of the University of Tokyo, Japan, answers our questions about his latest research article Solid grains ejected from terrestrial exoplanets as a probe of the abundance of life in the Milky Way in the International Journal of Astrobiology (IJA)
Q&A with Author Kostas Kampourakis about his upcoming Cambridge Festival event
When do parasites infect hosts? And does timing differ between separate host populations? Answers to these questions are fundamental to our understanding of host-parasite interactions and co-evolution. Yet often these aspects of host-parasite interactions are understudied.
Starting my PhD in 2020 on the conservation of Swedish parasitic freshwater mussels (Order: Unionida), I initially noted a lack of effort put into the study of what these mussels actually do to their hosts. If our goal is to increase the number of these mussels in our lakes and rivers, this will inevitably have some downstream impact on their host fishes.
Despite its impact on United States (US) food safety since the 1990’s, efforts to understand Cyclospora cayetanensis genetics only really began within the last 7 years. However, we have learned a great deal over that time; genotyping technologies now exist for Cyclospora, and these are being used routinely to complement cyclosporiasis outbreak investigations performed by US public health agencies
Biting midges (genus Culicoides) are one of the world’s smallest and most abundant blood-sucking flies. Haematophagous females are well-known vectors of several pathogens, including those affecting both livestock and wildlife.
Welcome to our “Meet the Editors” series, where we interview the editorial team about their work and their relationship to the journal. In this post we meet Professor Joseph A. Jackson, Editor for Parasitology.
Amber is a rich source of invertebrate fossils that constantly turn up new families, genera, and species. To become an amber fossil, an organism needs to be trapped in tree resin oozing from injured trees, which hardens and gets buried beneath sediment before fossilization at high pressure and temperature.
Play is often considered an indicator and promotor of animal welfare. Playing with your cat may also nurture closer cat-human bonds. In a new study, scientists have investigated these links by applying in-depth empirical methods to analyse data gathered from around the world.
Dr. Fay Clarke speaks to us about her career in social and biological science.
Javier González Miguel was one of the winners of the Early Career Researcher Award 2019, awarded each year by Parasitology for first or last authors of outstanding papers published in the journal. Three years later we catch up with him to see how his career has progressed since then.
2023 is set to be another landmark year for the journal, as a new contract between BirdLife International and Cambridge University Press coincides with a move to continuous, online-only publication, benefitting not only authors but also the range of conservation practitioners and decision-makers reliant on their important research.
Black swallowwort is a difficult to control invasive vine that thrives in natural areas and perennial cropping systems in northeastern North America. To date, though, little is known about how the weed responds to mowing or to various herbicidal controls.
we are delighted to announce that the new front cover image for Parasitology is of the human whipworm, Trichuris trichiura. We congratulate Dr Lee Haines, Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, who submitted this beautiful image as part of her photographic portfolio.
Though planting crops more densely can be an effective approach for suppressing weeds in problem areas, many growers fail to adopt this approach because of the high cost of seed. New research featured in the journal Weed Science, though, describes a bioeconomic model growers can use to overcome that cost barrier.
In a minority of societies, kinship follows the female line rather than the male line. The men in these matrilineal societies invest in their sisters’ offspring more than their own, which is a puzzle given that they are more related to the latter than the former.…
Tropical forests harbour a very high proportion of the planet’s terrestrial biodiversity, supporting wildlife communities that are more diverse and more species-rich than any other habitat.
I got into lichenology through a colleague, Dr George Mugambi, then working at the National Museums of Kenya, who was at the time undertaking research for his PhD at the Field Museum in Chicago.
Bustards are deeply challenging birds to conserve. Their grassland habitats are in irresistible demand for food production—both agriculture and livestock—throughout their ranges in the Eastern Hemisphere.
Eggshell quality has been a major economic concern to egg producers as it could be reason for serious economic losses. Eggshell has different functions such as protecting against physical damage and pathogens coming from the external environment and providing nutrients necessary for embryonic development, especially calcium.
Nematodes are one of the most speciose groups of animals, and a significant proportion of them are parasitic.
Over the past 18 months, several authors and two Guest Editors have worked together on a Special Issue (SI) on Fish Parasites for the Cambridge University Press journal, Parasitology, the longest-running journal among periodicals in the field. Our SI contains 13 articles, including reviews and original research articles, co-authored by world-leading experts in individual research fields of fish parasitology.
This year, Mona Suleiman, who is doing her PhD at the University of Bath, was the winner of the award. The competition this year was high, but Mona’s presentation stood out for the fundamental impacts of her research that were explained in a very comprehensible way.
Cameroon has pledged to restore over a quarter of its land or 12,062,800 ha, Guatemala has pledged over 10% of its land for restoration with 1.2 million ha, India committed over 8% of its land, a staggering 26,500,000 ha to restoration, and the list of countries pledging hectares of land to restoration continues.
Over 50 million waterbirds of more than 200 species migrate along the East Asian-Australasian Flyway (EAAF) each year. However, many of their populations have declined severely in recent decades.
Welcome to our “Meet the Editors” series, where we interview the editorial team about their work and their relationship to the journal. In this post we meet Dr Cinzia Cantacessi, Editor for Parasitology.
The latest Paper of the Month for Parasitology is Global epidemiology and molecular biology of Taenia multiceps: a comparative meta-analysis and in silico analysis study and is freely available for one month.…
California’s commercial orchards produce a variety of crops valued by consumers – from stone fruit to almonds and walnuts. A successful harvest depends on the effective management of weeds that can interfere with irrigation lines, compete with crops for water, and impede sweepers and other harvesting equipment.
Okra, is an important vegetable crop worldwide. The high nutritional attributes attract customer for a preferred food that assured sound health. But the rising concern of insect incidence facilitated by environmental factor put worries to million of farmers across the globe.
Through their travels, migratory birds link countries and continents. Many populations of migratory birds are in decline and more than 200 species are currently globally threatened.…
The latest Paper of the Month for Parasitology is “Cell repertoire and proliferation of germinative cells of the model cestode Mesocestoides corti” and is freely available for one month.…
Vultures are keystone species that perform a vital ecosystem service by disposing of carrion. Veterinary use of the painkilling drug diclofenac to treat livestock has caused the collapse of vulture populations throughout South Asia, with dramatic ecological and socio-economic consequences.
The benefits of data sharing and improved data access are widely acknowledged, potentially resulting in significant increases in global GDP. In practice, however, data owners are, for obvious reasons, often reluctant to share their data, especially if it has not yet been published.
Cover crops can be a valuable tool for weed suppression. They compete with weeds for light, water, nutrients and space and reduce the ability of weeds to germinate, grow and reproduce. But which is better – planting a single cover crop or using one of the new cover crop mixtures that are now readily available?
More and more research is finding inflammation as a potential contributing factor towards to the development of various mental illnesses. A systematic review was conducted to determine the association between parasitic infection and mental illnesses in various African populations. Two parasite groups were evaluated; helminths and protozoans, and four mental illness classifications; depressive disorders, anxiety disorders, schizotypal disorders and unspecified mental illnesses.
From January 2023, Parasitology will become an Open Access (OA) journal within Cambridge University Press, where a total of 14 other hosted journals within the Life Sciences are now fully OA.
Direct exploitation of organisms has been recognised as the second biggest driver of global extinction risk, and over a third of all bird species may be affected by international trade. Trade in living or dead birds taken from the wild is a multi-billion dollar industry that represents a major direct threat to the survival of many species and is a source of invasive species and zoonotic diseases. However, it has also been argued that trade may be sustainable in some areas, making important contributions to livelihoods and the viability of natural areas.
Palmer amaranth has a well-earned reputation as one of the most problematic weeds in agriculture. It is known for its many weedy traits and for its propensity to evolve resistance to herbicides of varying sites of action. An article featured in the latest issue of the journal Weed Science shows the number of tools available to control this weedy invader is continuing to shrink.
Downy brome is an annual winter grass that has invaded millions of acres of western rangelands and wildlands. It can outcompete native vegetation and can increase the frequency and severity of wildfires by leaving behind dense mats of litter at the end of its growing season.
Evolutionary theory has long been used to explain species and sex differences, but individual differences in cognition and behaviour have mostly been left out of the picture.
Researchers from the University of Missouri recently conducted two field studies to explore the effectiveness of electricity in weed control. They used a tractor attachment called The Weed Zapper™ to electrocute eight types of weeds common in soybean crops, including herbicide-resistant waterhemp.
For more than 40 years, the Important Bird and Biodiversity Areas (IBA) programme of BirdLife International has aimed to identify, document, safeguard, manage and monitor a network of sites of international significance for birds. The global list now extends to more than 13,500 IBAs, and is among the most extensive site-based, spatially explicit, systematically rigorous biodiversity datasets yet compiled.
Breeders estimate genetic gains over time to assess progress made for characteristics being improved through crossing, testing and selection in the target population of environments. Knowing and understanding the genetic gain rates helps on measuring the previous work and to fine-tune the strategy for crop betterment.
As the global human population approaches the 8 billion mark, it is sobering to think that around one third of these people will be carrying a parasitic helminth (worm) infection.…
Germination/emergence assays are relatively easy to perform, by following clear and standardised procedures. Most often, we take samples of seeds and we put them in Petri dishes/boxes/pots in some selected conditions (relating to, e.g., humidity content, light and temperature). We inspect those containers according to a tight schedule (e.g., daily) and, at each inspection, we count the number of germinated/emerged seeds and remove them from the containers.
Public interest in nature and the environment is at an all-time high thanks to many factors including new species discoveries, nature documentaries and the unfortunate reality of climate change. One important method for gauging this interest is Google Trends.
To celebrate World Albatross Day on 19 June 2022, this month’s third centenary collection of BCI papers focuses on the theme of seabirds and bycatch.…
The use of artificial intelligence with sensing techniques for the management of insect pests and diseases in cotton
Herbicide-resistant crops are now commonplace throughout the U.S. and Canada. But are they friend or foe when it comes to the prevention and management of herbicide-resistant weeds?
The languages we speak today are an incredibly rich record of the past. By analyzing the words they’re made up of, and the rules that guide how those words have evolved, we can gain insights into cultural contacts and the movements of peoples reaching back thousands of years.
The latest Paper of the Month for Parasitology is “A remarkable assemblage of ticks from mid-Cretaceous Burmese amber” and is available open access.…
When I first worked in Madagascar in 2005, I was carrying out biodiversity surveys in little known forests, but by the time I left a decade later I was spending much more time working with rural farming and fisher communities that I was with the birds and the beasts.…
Evidence of hunting, harvesting and persecution of wild birds dates back to the earliest of human societies. However, as human populations have grown, and technologies have advanced, the exploitation of wild birds has increased dramatically.…
A new analysis of ancient faeces found at the site of a prehistoric village near Stonehenge has uncovered evidence of the eggs of parasitic worms, suggesting the inhabitants feasted on the internal organs of cattle and fed leftovers to their dogs.…
It takes a lot of people to publish an issue of Parasitology. Each year the journal successfully publishes 14 issues, with over 170 papers contained therein. Essential, of course, are our dedicated authors but there are also many “behind-the-scenes” people crucial in making sure we disseminate high quality research into the public domain
Eurasian watermilfoil is a widespread invasive weed found in many lakes, ponds and other bodies of water. It can form dense mats that overtake native plants, destroy wildlife habitats and inhibit water sports.…
Traditional models of conformity posit that individuals respond to the frequency of a behaviour amongst a social group only. This gives the impression that conformity functions like a rule-of-thumb to ‘always copy the majority’. This view does not align with recent research which shows that our use of social learning strategies is likely to be flexible. To extend this research, we ask whether an individuals’ decision to conform to the majority of a group will be flexible based on certain social information about the group from whom they learn.
The latest Paper of the Month for Parasitology is “Honey bees with a drinking problem: potential routes of Nosema ceranae spore transmission” and is available open access.…
Cystoisospora suis is an intestinal protozoan parasite of swine, especially of suckling piglets. It severely affects the host by causing diarrhoea and reduced weight gain. This considerably impairs animal health, welfare and productivity. The parasite has a worldwide distribution, and infections are very common. The parasite belongs to the phylum Apicomplexa, which also includes other species of great medical and veterinary relevance by causing malaria, toxoplasmosis or coccidiosis.
The evolutionary arms race between parasites and their hosts have been fascinating/puzzling scientists for many years, and current World events have made even clearer about the importance of understanding host-parasite interactions.
Our ever-spreading infrastructure of housing, industry, water, energy and transport networks is destroying and degrading natural habitats. Artificial structures of various kinds, from fences to cell-phone masts, and electricity power lines to wind farms, pose a direct threat to many birds.…
The BCI Centenary Collections 2022 marks 100 years since the founding of the International Council for Bird Preservation (ICBP) – now BirdLife International, the largest international partnership for nature conservation.…
When a "nightmare dressed like a daydream" meets "mad, bad, and dangerous to know..."
Today is the 200th anniversary of Byron's death, the original tortured poet, and the release of @taylorswift13's new album.
Can you tell their lyrics apart? 🔗 https://cup.org/3U7P5VV
Congratulations to Michael Byers, Aaron Boley and Ignacio Cofone who have been shortlisted for the 2023 Donner Prize.
The award, for the best public policy book by a Canadian, will be announced in May.
🔗 https://cup.org/4aEq4ZN
'We are aware that infusion fluids can both save and hurt patients'.
Find out about modern Fluid Therapy in this week's featured author blog by Professor Robert Hahn
🔗 https://cup.org/3Q5YVqa
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