Ah! Our samples were all female, so I’m still not sure 😔 but I’ll add it to the list of questions once this is completed!

The pentastomes I am studying are sexually dimorphic with males being much smaller than the females. Sometimes the male cephalothorax isn’t as defined, and if you get them alive/recently deceased they are transparent enough to see the many many ova the females are carrying.

**porocephalidae (still waking up lol)

Raillietiella and porocephildae! I’m working on reference genomes for three species in Florida, two native and the invasive Raillietiella orientalis.

First wives club may not be one of the “better” ones, but it is one of my favorites, what a loss, she was delightful.

This was such a cool article and oddly specific to my background. I spent a couple of years researching electric fish from South America, and now I work with pentastomes (also in oligostraca). I had the same question, and my guess is that chitin isn’t conductive.

[Your Name] is confusing. Is it meant to be a template? If yes, the beginning should be set up with “Hello [Name of Addressee],”.

Where does the body of the text go? Under or above the condescending instructions?

Dear Kevin,

Make it make sense.

Queerly and Sincerely,
The rest of us

He looks a bit like Thomas Haden Church (sandman in Spider-Man no way home)

I bit my nails after feeding fish bloodworms and mysid shrimp. I thought I had washed and scrubbed my hands enough after feeding. I did not. 🤢

Look at the stubby tail 😭

There is more information about the invasive pentastome species in Florida here if you’re interested: slamconservation.weebly.com

Depends on the pentastome! The invasive Raillietiella orientalis seems to be not very picky about snake hosts, which is unfortunate. They were likely introduced to FL with Burmese Pythons. Some other pentastome species have been known to infect humans as well, so there is some unknown zoonosis 😬

Thank you!! I love it, my only complaint is that I don’t have cute animal photos to share like other biologists 😂

Hi Bluesky! I’m Stevie, an MS student at UCF working in the first nuclear genomes of three species of pentastomes (bizarre crustacean parasites that infect snakes). I’m especially interested in how invasive pentastomes are impacting native snake populations and how genomics can help us combat them.