Nematodes?

[Hedorah99]

Thank you, all! That was excellent information, Cheshire and Neoscales. On the downside, I'm sorry I lost a beautiful 4" Coremiocnemis. On the upside, how often do you get a really good reason to go buy whiskey and cigarettes! Woot!

There is always reason to buy whiskey.

Sorry about your loss.

 

[Talkenlate04]

Nematodes don't feast on dead flesh, maggots do. They are parasites usually feeding on the digesting food in the gut tract. I have seen fly strike go from an animal that died to complete infestation in less than 5 hours. One individual phorid fly can lay hundreds of eggs in no time at all. And what Shadowblade said, it may have been infested before it came in the collection. Different flies have different lifecycles.

Not all parasitic creatures die when the host dies. I have had worms come out of nowhere like that duing the last days of life and after the death of a T. I even took it two steps farther and put the T that died in an isolated inclosure. Those worms never matured into anything. They were alive for more then two weeks just wiggling around, some getting bigger and some not doing much at all. But if you know anything about the life cycle of any fly that you would maybe have laying eggs in your house, they dont have a two week larva stage. They barely have a two week life cycle.

Now in this case there were no after death watches done on the T so nothing can be said for sure, but I know for a fact that nematodes can be bigger then the picture shown above this.
Some of the people responding have never seen nematodes ether. Ether way no one can say for sure.

 

[Hedorah99]

Not all parasitic creatures die when the host dies. I have had worms come out of nowhere like that duing the last days of life and after the death of a T. I even took it two steps farther and put the T that died in an isolated inclosure. Those worms never matured into anything. They were alive for more then two weeks just wiggling around, some getting bigger and some not doing much at all. But if you know anything about the life cycle of any fly that you would maybe have laying eggs in your house, they dont have a two week larva stage. They barely have a two week life cycle.

Now in this case there were no after death watches done on the T so nothing can be said for sure, but I know for a fact that nematodes can be bigger then the picture shown above this.
Some of the people responding have never seen nematodes ether. Ether way no one can say for sure.

You really don't listen at all do you? I never said they don't live beyond the host. Strongiles, which are a type of nematode, free live in the soil or in the guts of many of the animals I work with on a daily basis. I have seen them living in stool that was over 24 hours old, already starting to make tehir way into the soil. Nematodes can get fairly large, but still have the long, slender, annelid-esque body, not the short, squat carnivorous maggot like forms, like the maggost in the pictures show. They can be larger but they tend to emerge after already reaching full size and overpopulating a host, hence whey they would be pouring out the mouth. I lost two T's to phorid flies which both orginated in the mouth of the T, and had maggots exactly resembling the ones in the picture. And since when was I questioning this "Scientfic study" you did with the dead T isolated for two weeks. I was answering the question as to what was infecting the picture. I like how you respond by accusing me of not knowing the life cycle of a fly. You obviously didn't know the life cycle of a maggot or a nematode.

 

[Talkenlate04]

Nematodes don't feast on dead flesh,

I was addressing this statment.
And if you read the last statment at the bottem I state that nothing can be said for sure ether way.

And since when was I questioning this "Scientfic study" you did with the dead T isolated for two weeks.

I dont recall saying anywhere that you were questioning it. Thats just you trying to pick a bone with me again.

I never said they don't live beyond the host

I never said you said that. I was talking about them eating dead flesh, and being present on a dead host.

 

[Sheri]

Thank you Randy and Chesire (and others as well) for your information.

I would remind everyone that members and guests looking for information are quickly able to identify those that have solid facts and documentation over those that don't.

I understand and relate to the compulsion to correct all disinformation with regard to the hobby, but it may be easier on your time and sanity to merely address the info deficit rather than indulging those with less reliable data.

Thank you. And Ottawa lost.

 

[Stylopidae]

On the upside, how often do you get a really good reason to go buy whiskey and cigarettes! Woot!

If you're going to acon, we should totally kill some phorid flies together

Same to the rest of you

As for the nematode thing (hopefully without starting too much drama), there are species where the young are parasitic and the adults are free living and there also seem to be species that are free living, but will happily parasitize other animals if they get the chance.

They really are fascinating critters by themselves. Maybe in a seperate life I would have gone into parasitology instead of entomology. Oh, well...maybe as another minor or as a seperate area of interest

Parasites are fascinating animals. The ways they've evolved to thwart the defenses of their hosts are just simply amazing. Some even have four or five seperate stages of metamorphoses...even reproducing in multiple stages.

Randy...could you send me the information that you amassed on the parasitic nematodes or even post a bit more of it here?

I always thought that they were transmitted through infected food. I ran tests on the crickets I had, which means I basically let dead specimens sit in dirt for a few days and then looked at it through a microscope and confirmed the presence of nematodes. I didn't go all the way through Koch's postulates, though so it wasn't soley scientific.

These nematodes only affected young centipedes. I lost 5 S. polymorpha pedelings. My tarantulas and adult centipedes were unaffected.

 

[DrAce]

Related Curiosity

On a related note...

Do any of the Arachnologists out there (Cheshire, CodeMonkey...) know anything about the immune system in a spider/tarantula? My limited understanding is that they would lack an adaptive immune response (antibodies, T-cells, B-Cells) since these are only known in higher animals, but I am curious as to what they have instead.

Do they get an inflammatory response? If so, the alterations in internal hydrostatic pressure might be responsible for the 'diskinetic syndrome' that people observe; given their hard external skeleton, there would be difficulty controling hydrostatics if there was an inflammatory 'swelling' in an area.

Also, in hindsight, I regret posting my "looks like nematodes" post... I intended to comment that it looked like the pictures I have seen here of nematodes. I've never had an infestation of any type *knock wood*