Call To Arms: Invert Pathogens

[cacoseraph]

Call To Arms: Invert Pathogens

I have recently seen an unusually high number of "should i release them?" threads in various forums. In and of itself, this is not particularly alarming... but the trend of users telling the OP it is ok is quite concerning!


A while ago i made a little subforum that was hidden from public view so that i could work on invert pathogens with just a few people... but i sort of let the project fall by the way side.

Now i see that i was going about things the wrong way... i should have had this publicly accessible from the beginning as i have lost over a year of potentially valuable contributions from all of you!


So i ask all of you now.... please help me to learn all we can about invertebrate pathogens so that we can finally (eventually) have a hard paper full of nice scientific citations to show any who doubt the dubious value to a species of being released back into nature from someone's collection!



The newlly public sub-forum is here:
http://scabies.myfreeforum.org/forum46.php <-- cacoseraph's workshop: The Coming Plague

p.s.
if you are not already a member of SCABIES and wish to join please do! general membership to the forum is not resticted in any way! there are a few of our subforums that are private... but the vast majority are viewable by all and postable by any registered user
if you do not wish to join scabies, but would like to contribute to this effort you can post links and discussion in this thread in whatever forum you found it in and i will add the reference to the scabies subforum



thanks for reading!

[Dom]

I'm new to inverts so I'm not up to speed on the topic of invert pathogens.
I do know though that it is believe the near global decline and possibly extinction of some species is due to chytrid fungus which is believed to have origniated from African clawed frogs. I know of a few serious herpers that have had mystery pathogens sweep through their collection wiping out much of their collection. These collections have been fairly specialized into a few genera and whatever hit them hit them hard.
It's very concievable that an invert from one continent may carry a pathogen that is harmless to it that is lethal to species that have never been exposed to the pathogen.
This is something I've wondered about in the past and am surprised I've never seen the issue addressed until now.
Excellent post and start to the discussion Cacoseraph .