PARASITES: DISEASE OR DELIGHT?
PROFESSOR JENS HOEG – COPENHAGEN, DENMARK

 

Whenever I tell people I work with parasites, nauseated looks generally follow.

Parasites could be considered as variety of disease — feeding off the animal they live on, either internally or externally. For most people they are quite horrible. Something abnormal in nature, something unwanted. 

But as a marine zoologist, I am exploring how certain parasites and even some bacterial diseases actually sustain and nourish ecosystems and habitats. In some cases parasites are connected to our very survival.

Biologists have increasingly understood that parasites are part of a fully functional living world and if removed, the infrastructure of our planet would be drastically altered.

The parasites I specialize in live on crustaceans (crabs, shrimps and prawns) and although extremely common, their life cycle and biology was pretty much unknown 20 years ago. Through a series of molecular experiments and field sampling, and painstaking culture in the laboratory our aim was to understand the life cycle of these parasites.

This understanding is vital. The European shore crab is extremely common in their native waters but because of human interference it is has spread to Tasmania in Australia and to the east and west coast of America. In these ecosystems the crab spreads much faster than in its home in Europe and could do immense damage to local fauna and not least shellfish fisheries. When a new species spreads they very often arrive without their normal diseases and parasites which indicate very significantly their spread is triggered because they are not susceptible to their normal parasite load.

Currently, we are running a research programme on crabs in Danish waters to understand the basic facts about their biology and how they interact with the parasites. Once this has been completed we will be in a position to understand how we can control areas where the crabs have spread and now potentially threaten ecosystems.

Highly evolved parasites are the hidden factor in some animals and could help us solve certain equations in ecological operations. By understanding these parasites more than we do, we can be in a much better position to protect our environment as natural or imposed changes occur.

Web of Science is my preferred search engine. It is an endless portal of information, general and species, or author specific. A programme that is user friendly would be my engine of choice.

For me, because Web of Science works both ways, I can normally find everything I have done and often find things that I didn't know existed but which are important to me. It also allows me, with a click, to see which of my own work is the most cited and thus assists me in optimizing my own research efforts the benefit of the scientific community.


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