BACKGROUND: Buffalo is one of the most important animals for the source of milk and meat, and it is also used for draught purposes in Bangladesh. Gastrointestinal parasites in the buffalo calves lead to reduced growth and hinder the development of buffalo industry in Bangladesh. OBJECTIVES: The study was conducted to identify the gastrointestinal parasitic load in the buffalo calves at Sylhe...

conclusions parasitic contamination of fresh herbs sold in izeh may pose a health risk to consumers if eaten as unwashed or improperly washed. results parasitic pollution was detected in 3.5% of the examined samples, including cryptosporidium spp. oocyst (1.5%), giardia spp. cyst (1%), blastocystis spp. cyst (0.5%) and taenia spp. egg (0.5%). materials and methods four hundred samples of fresh ...

Accurate egg placement into or onto a living host is an essential ability for many parasitoids, and changes in associated phenotypes, such as ovipositor morphology and behaviour, correlate with significant host shifts. Here, we report that in the ichneumonid group of koinobiont spider-ectoparasitoids ("polysphinctines"), several putatively ancestral taxa (clade I here), parasitic on ground-dwel...

The common cuckoo (Cuculus canorus) is an avian brood parasite, laying its eggs in the nests of other bird species, where these hosts incubate the parasitic eggs, feed and rear the nestlings. The appearance of a cuckoo egg in a host nest may change the bacterial community in the nest. This may have consequences on the hatchability of host eggs, even when hosts reject the parasitic egg, typicall...

1. In a population of American coots ( Fulica americana ) breeding in central British Columbia, Canada, some females pursued a reproductive strategy that combined nesting with laying parasitic eggs in the nests of conspecifics. To understand why only one quarter of the nesting females laid parasitically, I examined social and ecological factors that could potentially constrain nesting females f...

Aim. External fertilisation requires synchronisation of gamete release between the two sexes. Adequate synchronisation is essential in aquatic media because sperm is very short-lived in water. In the cichlid Lamprologus callipterus, fertilisation of the eggs takes place inside an empty snail shell, where females stay inside the shell and males have to ejaculate into the shell opening. This spaw...

Many bird species can reject foreign eggs from their nests. This behaviour is thought to have evolved in response to brood parasites, birds that lay their eggs in the nest of other species. However, not all hosts of brood parasites evict parasitic eggs. In this study, we collate data from egg rejection experiments on 198 species, and perform comparative analyses to understand the conditions und...

Adult great spotted cuckoos Clamator glandarius damage the eggs of their magpie Pica pica host without removing them from the nest or eating them but by producing the death of the embryo. Observations as well as experiments were used to test several predictions of two different possibilities: great spotted cuckoo egg-damaging behavior is a parasitic tactic resulting from a direct selection proc...

It takes a special kind of insect to pollinate an inside-out flower, which is exactly what the wasps that pollinate figs do. Crawling inside the firm swelling lined with microscopic flowers that will eventually ripen into a fleshy fig, tiny fig wasps pollinate the flowers within while laying their own eggs. However, the fig wasps’ robust nursery is not entirely secure. Renee Borges from the Ind...