Southern California Society of Parasitologists

The Spring Meeting of the Southern California Society of Parasitologists scheduled for May, has been cancelled due to Covid-19. We still plan on having a fall meeting, and will provide information on the place, time and format at a future date. Hope everyone is staying safe.

Congratulations to Dr. Dana Morton at the University of California, Santa Barbara for successful defense of her Ph.D. thesis: "The effects of parasites on the kelp forest food web." You can access here presentation at: https://youtu.be/4oizD8eaQr0.

SCSP wishes everyone the happiest of holidays and a New Year filled with wondrous symbionts!

Dr. Ryan Hechinger has completed the guide to the trematodes infecting the California horn snail. Although these parasites have been subject to a large amount of taxonomic, biological, evolutionary and ecological research, and have even been proposed for use as ecological indicator tools, there has not been a satisfactory guide. This should fill the void for a while. It is available at Zootaxa: https:/www.mapress.com/j/zt/article/view/zootaxa.4711.3.3

The fall meeting of SCSP was hosted by the lab of Dr. Ryan Hechinger, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego on November 22, 2019. The meeting included a presentation on parasite research being carried out in the Hechinger lab, and a tour of the experimental aquarium arrays used to raise, infect and video killifish with Digenea and experimental mudflat arrays under artificial tide used to study California horn snails infected with Digenea. T...he meeting concluded with lab demonstrations of body snatcher trematodes in horn snails, soldier worms, Euhaplorchis metacercariae on killifish brains, a newly discovered mermithid nematode of a local crustacean, and kelp fly trypanosomes. Attendees included students, scientists and professors from the following institutions: University of California, Santa Barbara, University of Southern California at Los Angeles, University of Southern California, Saddleback Community College, Cabrillo Marine Aquarium and Orange County Sanitation District. A special thanks to Dr. Hechinger and his students for hosting the meeting. A description of the research being carried out in the Hechinger lab can be found at: https://scripps.ucsd.edu/labs/rhechinger/ See more

The Spring Meeting of SCSP will be held on May 3, 2019 at California State University, Northridge. The Spring Meeting is held in conjunction with the Annual Meeting of the Southern California Academy of Sciences. Abstracts for this year’s contributed paper session on Parasitology are due no later than March 8. Please visit the SCAS web site at the URL below to Register and submit abstracts. http://scas.nhm.org/annual-meeting/

The fall meeting of SCSP was hosted by the lab of Dr. Douglas Pace at California State University at Long Beach (CSULB) on November 16, 2018. The meeting included a presentation on parasite physiology research being carried out in the Pace lab and a lab demonstration measuring the respiration of larval parasites taken from local marine macroinvertebrates. Attendees included students, scientists and professors from the following institutions: CSULB, CSU Fullerton, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of Southern California at Los Angeles, Saddleback Community College and Cabrillo Marine Aquarium. A special thanks to Dr. Pace for hosting the meeting. A description of the research being carried out in the Pace lab can be found at: https://sites.google.com/site/ecophysiologylab/home