Spring Break
Dr. Janine Caira: UConn's parasitologist
J.D. Hill
Issue date: 2/19/03 Section: News
The image of the trail-weary naturalist hacking through dense thickets of tropical rainforest is the scene that most people would see as ripe for the discovery of rare species, new to the human eye. However, Dr. Janine Caira has described over 50 new species in an environment even less well-trekked - the interior of the ocean's sharks.
Caira is a parasitologist, a biologist who studies the many creatures that scrounge a living off host animals. Parasitologists are generalists by nature, familiar with broad classes of animals and their lifestyles.
"We have to know everything about the host and all the parasite groups...and the vertebrate host is just one of the hosts," said Caira.
Caira entered her line of work thanks to a summer job working on plant parasites taken at the advice of her high school gym teacher. She went on to get a master's degree in British Columbia based around her work with parasites of insects. After earning a PhD from the University of Nebraska, she came to UConn to establish her lab.
The Caira lab is constantly buzzing with activity, and the group is world-renowned for its work on cestodes, also known as the tapeworms. The cestodes include a large number of members which live in sharks and their relatives, the rays. Caira estimates that a typical shark species will have between one and four cestodes which parasitize it; a ray species may have up to a dozen.
Caira said that the reason for such diversity is a result of the long history that tapeworms, sharks and rays share.
"We think that they have been with their host for over 200 million years, and I think over that period of time, it's natural that you'll get [the emergence of new species]," she said.
According to Caira, tapeworms live almost exclusively in an organ known as the spiral intestine, a compact digestive organ that serves as a combination of the small and large intestines in mammals. The conditions within the spiral intestine vary across the different species of sharks and rays and provide different habitats for the cestodes which parasitize them.
Caira is a parasitologist, a biologist who studies the many creatures that scrounge a living off host animals. Parasitologists are generalists by nature, familiar with broad classes of animals and their lifestyles.
"We have to know everything about the host and all the parasite groups...and the vertebrate host is just one of the hosts," said Caira.
Caira entered her line of work thanks to a summer job working on plant parasites taken at the advice of her high school gym teacher. She went on to get a master's degree in British Columbia based around her work with parasites of insects. After earning a PhD from the University of Nebraska, she came to UConn to establish her lab.
The Caira lab is constantly buzzing with activity, and the group is world-renowned for its work on cestodes, also known as the tapeworms. The cestodes include a large number of members which live in sharks and their relatives, the rays. Caira estimates that a typical shark species will have between one and four cestodes which parasitize it; a ray species may have up to a dozen.
Caira said that the reason for such diversity is a result of the long history that tapeworms, sharks and rays share.
"We think that they have been with their host for over 200 million years, and I think over that period of time, it's natural that you'll get [the emergence of new species]," she said.
According to Caira, tapeworms live almost exclusively in an organ known as the spiral intestine, a compact digestive organ that serves as a combination of the small and large intestines in mammals. The conditions within the spiral intestine vary across the different species of sharks and rays and provide different habitats for the cestodes which parasitize them.