Quantifying spirorchiid eggs in splenic histological samples from green turtles

Abstract

The present study proposes a new methodology for the quantification of parasite eggs in animal tissue. Quantification of parasites are important to understand epidemiology of spirorchiid infections in sea turtles, however different methodologies for quantifying Spirorchiidae eggs in turtle tissues have been used. The most representative way to quantify Spirorchiidae burdens in tissues is counting eggs/g of tissue, however, this method is very laborious. As an alternative, we propose quantifying number of Spirorchiidae eggs/area of tissue on a microscope slide. We compared this method to number of eggs/slide, a common metric of egg burden in turtle tissues. Both methods correlated well with eggs/g with eggs/mm2 of tissue having better correlation.