I loooooove my animal biology 50A class. And this is a really REALLY good sign that I have finally found the right major. For the past three weeks we have been dissecting fish and recording what kind of parasites we find and where… the conditions of the organs… all that kind of research. So then we had to come up with a research topic and I came up with the idea that we should compare the weights of fish found to be parasitized with tapeworms with those fish of the same species and age that didn’t have tapeworms and see if there was a negative correlation between parasites and weight, i.e. do tapeworms hinder fish growth? We are going to compare weight and length from parasitized to healthy fish. I am so excited to start collating all of the information. There must be over 150 pages of data.
Ok, I realize that you must think this is incredibly weird and believe me, I think so too! Who in their right mind would want to spend hours going over pages of data about fish parasites and organizing them into lists and graphs? Well, me apparantly and if I had to do this for the rest of my life I think that I would be really satisfied. I think it may be especially exciting because it was my idea, my little parasite baby, and I want to see how it pans out. You know?
And you just can’t hide it…
Hello, I am curious about the tape worms in fish. We just got back from our favorite lake. We caught approximatel 15-20 fish.
As we started Cleaning them we realized that every one of them was fillied with tape worm. Some were small and some covered the inside body of the fish. This really is creepy. We distroyed all the fish and will not fish there again. Can you tell me is this normal for fish. Will it affect us if we did eat fish that had these. As for now were not taking any chances. We had our dogs up with us and I am going to treat them immeadiately for the possibility that while cleaning they might have gotton some on them. How creepy. If you want to study these the place is Lucky Peak Dam in Idaho outside of Boise. The fish seemed to be male in gender. Size didn’t show any difference. Small and large had them. The one the had the longest tape worm was approximately same size as others. There need to feed was understandable and that is why we caught so many. They will eat anything to feed the tape worms. No sign of other food in the intestins. What is your take on this.