Play Day at University of Lethbridge 2018

Held annually, the University of Lethbridge puts on Play Day, an event for families in the area to spend Family Day doing a multitude of fun activities. This year the event was on February 19, at the University of Lethbridge. Some of the more hands-on activities included fort building, rock wall climbing and open swim. We (Dr. Cam Goater, Micky Ahn and myself) partnered with U of L Let’s Talk Science, joining our parasite grossness with their cool science-fueled activities.

We drew the kids in with some creepy samples, talking to parents and kids a-like about a range of different parasites. One of the favourite games to play was “Guess the host,” the kids were shown three of the same kind of worm (Ascaris) of different sizes and asked what kind of animal they came from. All of them were shocked to learn the biggest came from human intestines! We had live gammarus, half of which were infected with an acanthocephalan parasite. We had the kids look to see if they could see which of the shrimp were infected as the infected ones had a light orange dot in them. We walked through a variety of other samples including tapeworms, canine heartworm and horse hair worm.

Lastly, we had a large tick display! We had two large papier-mache ticks, a sample of adult wood ticks, a sample of nymph stage ticks, and using a compound light microscope, adults and kids alike could see the mouthpart of the ticks. We talked about the different diseases you can get from ticks and ways to prevent getting ticks if you’re going for hike (including tucking in your pants into your socks and wearing long sleeves).

Overall, the event was a success! We constantly had people coming by our table and some even sharing their stories about their own parasite encounters! Over a thousand people came to have fun at Play Day, with many families taking the time to check out our samples of freaky parasites.