Invertebrate herbivores are ubiquitous in most terrestrial ecosystems, and theory predicts that their impact on plant community biomass should depend on diversity and productivity of the associated plant communities. To elucidate general patterns in the relationship between invertebrate herbivory, plant diversity, and productivity, we carried out a long-term herbivore exclusion experiment at mu...

Natural products play an important role in drug discovery and many approved therapeutics as well as drug candidates have been derived from natural sources. They have been the source of most of the active ingredients of medicines. The beneficial medicinal effects of plant materials typically result from the combinations of secondary products present in the plan. These secondary metabolites const...

The liver fluke Fasciola gigantica is a trematode parasite of ruminants and humans that occurs naturally in Africa and Asia. Cases of human fascioliasis, attributable at least in part to F. gigantica, are significantly increasing in the last decades. The introduced snail species Galba truncatula was already identified to be an important intermediate host for this parasite and the efficient inva...

The molluscicidal activity of Commiphora molmol (myrrh) water suspension showed that Bulinus truncatus snails were found to be about 3 times more susceptible than Biomphalaria alexandrina snails. The 24-hour LC50 values recorded were 46.4 and 145.8 ppm, respectively. There was a significant negative correlation between LC values and exposure periods. The present study is yet the first attempt t...

AIM Fascioliasis is an important helminth disease caused by Fasciola (F.) hepatica and F gigantica of Asia and Africa. This disease belongs to the plant-borne trematode zoonoses. Human infection has been reported in 51 different countries from 5 continents. One of the possible approaches to control this problem is to interrupt the life cycle of the parasitic trematodes by eliminating the snail....

BACKGROUND Many parasites of medical and veterinary importance are transmitted by cold-blooded intermediate hosts or vectors, the abundance of which will vary with ambient temperatures, potentially altering disease prevalence. In particular, if global climate change will increase mean ambient temperature in a region endemic with a human pathogen then it is possible that the incidence of disease...

Current water treatment technologies are inefficient at treating water contaminated with metaldehyde, an 8-member cyclic tetramer of acetaldehyde widely used as a molluscicide in large-scale agriculture and in gardens, and which has been frequently observed to breach European regulatory limits in the UK due to its high solubility and frequent use. Here, we examine the controls on metaldehyde ad...

the effect of the mollusciciding of 364 different snail habitat with bayer 73 (bayluscide), undertaken during the period january 1968 to january 1973, for the control of urinary bilharziasis bas been evaluated in khuzestan, southwest iran. the criteria for assessment were as follows:1. complete kill was obtained when no live b.truncatus was found in monthly surveys for one entire year after mol...

The snail’s specie, Oncomelania quadrasi, is found abundantly in fresh water fish ponds of Punjab. It is an intermediate carrier / host of various digenetic trematode parasites which causes many serious fish diseases in aquaculture ponds. The purpose of this study was targeted for controlling these snails in aquatic environments through chemical control strategies using copper sulfate as an era...