A TSU biologist has found a rare species of tick
2020-10-15
TSU biologist Maria Orlova discovered an extremely rare species of parasite, Spinturnix scuticornis (Acari: Spinturnicidae). The invertebrate was taken from a Himalayan bat caught in Vietnam, where the bat is widespread. This is the first find for the Republic of Vietnam and the fourth in the world. The detection was also unusual: an unidentified tick was found among the parasites that are stored in the Zoological Museum of Moscow State University. The research results are published in the International Journal of Acarology.
- 2020 has limited the possibility of field trips, and each missed field season is a big loss for the researcher. To somehow compensate it, we decided to turn to the existing collections, - says Maria Orlova, a TSU Laboratory of Biological Diversity Monitoring staff member. - My colleague and co-author Sergei Kruskop invited me to work with the collection of bats at the Moscow State University Zoological Museum. At first, it was pure adventurism. There were no guarantees that the parasites would end up on animals, but I made a bet that ticks cling tightly to their hosts, remain in the fur and folds of the wings of even dead animals, and even, as in our case, are found among already collected fly bloodsuckers.
Read more: http://en.tsu.ru/news/a-tsu-biologist-has-found-a-rare-species-of-tick-/
- 2020 has limited the possibility of field trips, and each missed field season is a big loss for the researcher. To somehow compensate it, we decided to turn to the existing collections, - says Maria Orlova, a TSU Laboratory of Biological Diversity Monitoring staff member. - My colleague and co-author Sergei Kruskop invited me to work with the collection of bats at the Moscow State University Zoological Museum. At first, it was pure adventurism. There were no guarantees that the parasites would end up on animals, but I made a bet that ticks cling tightly to their hosts, remain in the fur and folds of the wings of even dead animals, and even, as in our case, are found among already collected fly bloodsuckers.
Read more: http://en.tsu.ru/news/a-tsu-biologist-has-found-a-rare-species-of-tick-/