Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Prologue
- 1 African trypanosomes and their VSGs
- 2 Malaria: the real killer
- 3 The HIV–AIDS vaccine and the disadvantage of natural selection: the yellow fever vaccine and the advantage of artificial selection
- 4 Lyme disease: a classic emerging disease
- 5 The discovery of ivermectin: a ‘crapshoot’, or not?
- 6 “You came a long way to see a tree”
- 7 Infectious disease and modern epidemiology
- 8 The ‘unholy trinity’ and the geohelminths: an intractable problem?
- 9 Hookworm disease: insidious, stealthily treacherous
- 10 The spadefoot toad and Pseudodiplorchis americanus: an amazing story of two very aquatic species in a very dry land
- 11 The schistosomes: split-bodied flukes
- 12 Dicrocoelium dendriticum and Halipegus occidualis: their life cycles and a genius at work
- 13 Trichinosis and Trichinella spp. (all eight of them, or is it nine?)
- 14 Phylogenetics: a contentious discipline
- 15 Toxoplasma gondii, Sarcocystis neurona, and Neospora caninum: the worst of the coccidians?
- Summary
- Index
- References
10 - The spadefoot toad and Pseudodiplorchis americanus: an amazing story of two very aquatic species in a very dry land
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 November 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Prologue
- 1 African trypanosomes and their VSGs
- 2 Malaria: the real killer
- 3 The HIV–AIDS vaccine and the disadvantage of natural selection: the yellow fever vaccine and the advantage of artificial selection
- 4 Lyme disease: a classic emerging disease
- 5 The discovery of ivermectin: a ‘crapshoot’, or not?
- 6 “You came a long way to see a tree”
- 7 Infectious disease and modern epidemiology
- 8 The ‘unholy trinity’ and the geohelminths: an intractable problem?
- 9 Hookworm disease: insidious, stealthily treacherous
- 10 The spadefoot toad and Pseudodiplorchis americanus: an amazing story of two very aquatic species in a very dry land
- 11 The schistosomes: split-bodied flukes
- 12 Dicrocoelium dendriticum and Halipegus occidualis: their life cycles and a genius at work
- 13 Trichinosis and Trichinella spp. (all eight of them, or is it nine?)
- 14 Phylogenetics: a contentious discipline
- 15 Toxoplasma gondii, Sarcocystis neurona, and Neospora caninum: the worst of the coccidians?
- Summary
- Index
- References
Summary
I shall not see the shadows,
I shall not feel the rain;
Song, Christina Georgina Rossetti (1830–1894)Even though they are buried several feet below the desert's scorched sand for most of the year, spadefoot toads, Scaphiopus couchii, definitely feel the rain when it comes. Remarkably, they feel it even though they cannot see it and they are not touched by it.
The beginning of Richard Tinsley's interest in the spadefoot toad, and Pseudodiplorchis americanus, a monogenetic trematode infecting the toad's urinary bladder, began in the late 1960s while he working on his Ph. D. at the University of Leeds in England. It was then, very early in his career, that he came across a publication written in 1940 for an obscure journal (The Wassman Collector) by L. O. Rodgers and Bob Kuntz. In this one and a half paged paper, Rodgers and Kuntz had described P. americanus, but nothing about the biology of the extraordinary interaction between this parasite and its host. Richard said, however, holding a now yellowed Xerox copy of the paper in his Bristol office, “There is enough in here [in the Rodgers/Kuntz paper] to show that there is an exciting story to be told. First of all it's a monogenean. Then, with my interests in this group of vertebrates, I knew that its host was completely terrestrial. But, I knew that the toad returned to water for a very short time each year.
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- Parasites and Infectious DiseaseDiscovery by Serendipity and Otherwise, pp. 254 - 264Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007