# You will never know what is inside...



## Dark Raptor (Sep 20, 2007)

Look what I found inside my Misumena vatia crab spider. 4 nematodes, all of them 8 - 13cm long (spider has only 2 cm). I think it was invaded by infective juveniles inside its preys (I've been giving it only insects captured in the field).

Before:






After:












You better be carefull what you are giving to your pets...


----------



## P. Novak (Sep 20, 2007)

Wow, that's scary!  Gorgeous looking spider though, too bad it died. I'm sorry for your loss.


----------



## Dark Raptor (Sep 20, 2007)

P. Novak said:


> Wow, that's scary!  Gorgeous looking spider though, too bad it died. I'm sorry for your loss.


Luckily it is very common specie here, in Poland. But I expected to get offspring from her. This time it was bad luck... but I was able to get some very rare pics It cuts both ways


----------



## P. Novak (Sep 20, 2007)

Dark Raptor said:


> Luckily it is very common specie here, in Poland. But I expected to get offspring from her. This time it was bad luck... but I was able to get some very rare pics It cuts both ways


Well then thats good!  Yes, very rare and very good pics. What did you end up doing with the nematodes?


----------



## Rain_Flower (Sep 20, 2007)

That is one of my favorite spiders eeeveeer. I'm sorry for your loss


----------



## OTwolfe (Sep 20, 2007)

Whoa! How did you know they were in the spider? Did you do an autopsy? How common are nematodes in wild spiders?


----------



## P. Novak (Sep 20, 2007)

OTwolfe said:


> Whoa! How did you know they were in the spider? Did you do an autopsy? How common are nematoes in wild spiders?


I was just thinking the same thing. Did you perform an autospy when it died or did they burst out, or..


----------



## Widowman10 (Sep 20, 2007)

holy cow!! never seen something like that before!!!


----------



## syndicate (Sep 20, 2007)

thats quite out of control!ive never seen something like this.are u sure there nematodes?


----------



## beetleman (Sep 20, 2007)

wow! that is amazing,and they were all inside of her,very interesting!


----------



## Widowman10 (Sep 20, 2007)

beetleman said:


> wow! that is amazing,and they were all inside of her,very interesting!


man if they were all in her, i bet she looked like she was gravid! huuuge!


----------



## Selenops (Sep 20, 2007)

Ew! Invert horror story. To reiterate another posters question, How did you discover them?


----------



## Blahbar (Sep 20, 2007)

Once when i was like 10, found a cricket in my room and disposed of it in the toliet.  Dont know why but left it there and didnt flush it, when I came back a few hours later to use the toliet I found a huge worm crawing out of the cricket, swiming around in the water.  Talk about trama...still have nightmares.


----------



## Selenops (Sep 21, 2007)

Blahbar, you've just traumatized me, I don't think I can use the toilet ever again.

::shivers uncontrollably::

What the heck, Halloween is next month! :evil:


----------



## Dark Raptor (Sep 21, 2007)

OTwolfe said:


> Whoa! How did you know they were in the spider? Did you do an autopsy? How common are nematodes in wild spiders?


No, they just disembowel spider and moved outside. I can't tell you how common they are. I started studying literature about "arthropopatogenic" nematodes. I found almost nothing about spider parasites in this group. I think it is still "blank page" in science. I'll prepare short scientific article for one of the polish scientific magazines.


----------



## Taceas (Sep 21, 2007)

I am sorry for your loss, it was a beautiful spider. =(

They look similar to roundworms to me. I see them every now and then in chicken droppings.

I too have a cricket story. A few years ago we had a very noisy black field cricket in the house. I managed to catch it and I forgot to take it outside, so it sat overnight in a delicup. 

I woke up the next morning to the cricket walking around without 15 "ends" of worms sticking out of its cloaca, writhing around like a bowl of maggots. Truly disgusting!


----------



## mr.wilderness (Sep 21, 2007)

Blahbar said:


> Once when i was like 10, found a cricket in my room and disposed of it in the toliet.  Dont know why but left it there and didnt flush it, when I came back a few hours later to use the toliet I found a huge worm crawing out of the cricket, swiming around in the water.  Talk about trama...still have nightmares.


Sounds like a horsehair worm.  The larva are parasites inside insects and when they're about to mature, they release some chemical that makes the insect go drown itself so the adult can emerge.  I guess you did the drowning part for it, though


----------



## Martin H. (Sep 22, 2007)

Hello "Dark Raptor",

you have specified that they do not wish to receive emails via the forum – any way to get in touch with you private?

all the best,
Martin


----------



## The_Thunderer (Sep 23, 2007)

While completely disgusting, this does help me to never feed my pets W/C prey.


----------



## Stylopidae (Sep 23, 2007)

Dark Raptor, I think your problem may be your search terms.

Have you tried entomopathogenic or araneopathogenic?

But, yeah...those are definitely nematodes. No mistaking them. The only other thing they could be are annelids and I don't know of any parasitic annelids off the top of my head (excluding leeches-ectoparasites...not endoparasites). Either way, they don't show any sort of segmentation.

Just goes to show...WC prey is a no-no.


----------



## Crysta (Sep 23, 2007)

Hm..I've had this happen to me a many times.
It seemed to me, they usually come out of the animal when they sense that their host is in distrese.. When I picked up w/c crickets or grass hopers, I usually squish them halway several times to see if any parasitic worms would come out...usually it works, every 5th cricket (approx) I caught appeared to have some worms come out when I did this..
But, thinking again; having parasitic problems in crickets and locust are probably not rare in captive bred specimens either.


----------



## OTwolfe (Sep 24, 2007)

Is there a way to tell if captive bred crics have parasites? If I asked the sales person at the store I buy from, would they have any way of knowing? Note to self, partially squish T food from now on. :4:


----------



## Crysta (Sep 24, 2007)

No, I don't really know if there is, unless you'd like to break open every cricket you have..


----------



## Dark Raptor (Sep 25, 2007)

Martin H. said:


> you have specified that they do not wish to receive emails via the forum – any way to get in touch with you private?


Hi. Now it should be working.



			
				Cheshire said:
			
		

> Dark Raptor, I think your problem may be your search terms.
> 
> Have you tried entomopathogenic or araneopathogenic?
> 
> ...


I've been also seraching for the literature with term "araneopathogenic". These parasites are "unpopular" because spiders are not pests like insects. Entomopatogenic nematodes are commonly used as biological control agents, so you can find tons of information about them.

PS. My wife prepares doctor thesis about nematodes (parasites of Tenebrionidae beetles), so I know how to ID this group


----------



## Stylopidae (Sep 25, 2007)

Dark Raptor said:


> PS. My wife prepares doctor thesis about nematodes (parasites of Tenebrionidae beetles), so I know how to ID this group


Not trying to knock you, man...I'm fully aware of what you do for a living . Just thought you might have had a momentary lapse.

I figured more had been done with spider parasites.


----------



## arachnocat (Sep 26, 2007)

That would totally gross me out. I know Jerusalem crickets get them but I didn't realize they were so common in other inverts. Yuk. Here's a video I found of one coming out of a cricket.

[YOUTUBE]IMwo9qji47s[/YOUTUBE]


----------



## Widowman10 (Sep 26, 2007)

arachnocat said:


> That would totally gross me out. I know Jerusalem crickets get them but I didn't realize they were so common in other inverts. Yuk. Here's a video I found of one coming out of a cricket.


um, ok. that was really disgusting/disturbing.   but VERY interesting and really cool at the same time


----------



## beetleman (Sep 26, 2007)

arachnocat said:


> That would totally gross me out. I know Jerusalem crickets get them but I didn't realize they were so common in other inverts. Yuk. Here's a video I found of one coming out of a cricket.
> 
> [YOUTUBE]IMwo9qji47s[/YOUTUBE]


 holy smokes! that thing was huge.amazing........well time for some noodles i'm gettin hungry


----------



## vvx (Sep 26, 2007)

Well I think this thread has driven the point "do not feed WC prey" into everyone's head who saw it. Scary stuff...


----------



## arachnocat (Sep 28, 2007)

Doesn't make me wanna go swimmin either


----------



## Widowman10 (Sep 28, 2007)

arachnocat said:


> Doesn't make me wanna go swimmin either


hahaha! why? could be interesting...;P 

on a different note, does anybody know what that was? i'm not too keen on identifying parasites/worms/whatever the heck that thing was...


----------



## UrbanJungles (Sep 28, 2007)

> Is there a way to tell if captive bred crics have parasites?


You can pretty much bet that most adult CB crickets have parasites...mostly roundworms...

At the museum I work for, we do an annual worming of our live reptile collection because they inherently pick up roundworms and other parasites from the crickets they are fed. We've positively identified the crickets as vectors even after swtiching suppliers 4 times over the last 5 years.

This is why some people advocate routine de-wormings for all animals cb or wc.


----------



## vvx (Sep 28, 2007)

How do you de-worm a tarantula?


----------



## UrbanJungles (Sep 28, 2007)

My post was referring to reptiles and amphibians...I don't recommend deworming a spider.


----------



## Widowman10 (Sep 28, 2007)

UrbanJungles said:


> My post was referring to reptiles and amphibians...I don't recommend deworming a spider.


uh, that would be quite weird...


----------



## Stylopidae (Sep 28, 2007)

Pretty much everything has parasites. Thing is most parasites don't kill their hosts (not directly, anyways). They generally need their hosts do do something to get them to the next generation. Sometimes, they need their hosts to do something as simple as keep eating so they can reproduce inside and release their progeny through various means...or other times they need their host to get eaten. Compared to the majority of parasitic organisms, it's very uncommon for a parasite to disembowel the host and emerge in a way most of the pictures of parasites on here show. We probably don't notice 90% of parasites. They just don't hurt the critter in a way we can see.

Case in point...anyone reading this probably has a tapeworm cyst somewhere in their body. It's just sitting there, waiting for that peice of muscle to get eaten by something. If you're wondering where you got it from, the last place it was in (before you) was the muscle of a cow or pig...and it was doing the same thing.

I also have a centipede that has been infected with nematodes for 2 years now at least. It was wild caught and fed crickets for awhile, so either of those places could be the source. I've tried changing the substrate, anesthetizing the centipede and washing it with a Q tip...the nematodes are definitely coming from the centipede.

It's lived like that for 18 months since I first noticed the infection.

Now...a lot of parasites get pretty specific to their hosts during the course of evolution. They are very, very sensitive to biochemical cues that guide them to the organs where they live or reproduce.

If they end up in the wrong organism, these signals aren't there and that causes the system to go haywire.

One famous example is an intestinal parasite of racoons, that when in a human will burrow into the eye, liver, heart or brain because it can't find the proper place to go.

There's a term for it...but I can't remember.

The famous nematodes...the ones that make tarantulas look they have rabies...probably aren't natural spider parasites. Most likely, they're parasitic on insects and when they get into a spider, they go overboard on reproduction because the biochemical cues aren't the same.

So...yeah. Long post short, basically everything has parasites (or epiphytes) of some shape or form.

The ones you should worry about are the the vast minority that kill your spider and the only way to avoid them is to raise your own food.

Has anyone noticed that everyone confuses lobster roach penises for nematodes?

Weird.


----------



## beetleman (Sep 28, 2007)

vvx said:


> How do you de-worm a tarantula?


ya don't


----------



## ShawnH (Sep 28, 2007)

This reminds me of a really interesting show I saw on national geographic I think.  It described the life cycle of a snail parasite.  The parasite used bird droppings as the vector.  The snail ate the bird droppings, the eggs in the droppings hatched in the snail.  The snail was eaten from the inside out by the worms.  The worms made the snail crawl into plain view of birds where it was then eaten.  So wierd.


----------



## UrbanJungles (Sep 28, 2007)

> Pretty much everything has parasites. Thing is most parasites don't kill their hosts (not directly, anyways).


Death by parasitism is a relic of captivity.  In the wild, most animals don't routinely come in contact with their own feces which usually harbor parasites on the way out looking for a new host to infect.  They become re-infected over and over...

:?


----------



## Stylopidae (Oct 1, 2007)

UrbanJungles said:


> Death by parasitism is a relic of captivity.  In the wild, most animals don't routinely come in contact with their own feces which usually harbor parasites on the way out looking for a new host to infect.  They become re-infected over and over...
> 
> :?


Depends on the species. I doubt the flies and wasps which periodically end up on the boards after bursting out of tarantulas would have spared their hosts in the wild.

Some parasites go through primary hosts which must be completely different from the secondary host...so on and even so forth sometimes.

So...yeah. Depends on the parasite.


----------



## The_Thunderer (Oct 1, 2007)

Wow.  I'm completely disgusted by what I've seen... as well as intrigued.  Gross and kewl at the same time.  LOL.


----------



## Sven G. (Sep 17, 2016)

Any chance to get the pictures working again?


----------



## Ranitomeya (Sep 18, 2016)

Parasites normally do not kill their hosts, but parasitoids do. Parasites are usually only an issue with weakened individuals or captive individuals whose parasite loads are high enough to be a problem. Parasitoids, on the other hand, kill their hosts or make them incapable of reproduction--which may as well be death since it removes it from the breeding population.

Reactions: Informative 1


----------

