cecildomyiidae's Favorites

After Hurricane Dolly made landfall at South Padre Island, I went to Padre Island to look for any unusual critters brought by the storm. I found an unusually high number of yellow sea whips, Leptogorgea setacea and many Sea whip Simnia, Simnialena marferula, a small ectoparasitic snail that lives and feeds on the host sea whip. The animal acquires the same coloration of its host and both the animal and the shell are yellow. The mantle of the snail is yellow mottled with black or brown. The mantle has short fingerlike extensions called papillae (seen on some photos here). The shell is yellow-orange (depending on the host's color), without any color markings, and the aperture is whitish. The photos shown here were taken in a lab in Corpus Christi, under the microscope; the location on the map is where the specimens were collected. Some authors consider this a synonym of Simnialena uniplicata, e.g, Rosenberg et al, 2009 in BioGoMx:
http://gulfbase.org/biogomx/biospecies.php?species=Spp-33-0477

I would very much like to thank the microbiology team at UCR for permitting access and assistance in distributing these photos to the public: thank you Adriana Troyo, Enrique Chaves and Ivan... so, so very cool!

Don Enrique helped us distinguish the difference between the male and female of the species... (hint, the distance between the compound eyes is one determining factor)

We (my son Daniel Arthur and I) took some samples of the larvae from the foot of the sheep. It really appears to be the Gusano Barrenador es una enfermedad parasitaria causada por las larvas de la mosca Cochliomyia hominivorax