Western Canada High School Science Club Visit 2017

As requested by the teacher and students of the science club of Western Canada High School during our last HPI team visit in spring, we went back to talk about all kinds of amazing parasites on Tuesday, November 28^th.

We started by introducing ourselves (Leah Hohman, Jeanie Quach, Grace Mariene, Susan Wang and myself) and talking about the cool parasite-related research that we are working on. Then, I gave a brief introduction on parasites, describing what they are, where they live, what they do and the problems they cause globally. As an example, Dicrocoelium dendriticum was mentioned as a parasite with an indirect life cycle who has the ability to turn their ant hosts into zombies so that they cling to the flowers. This increases the likelihood of transmission of the parasite to ruminant definitive hosts. The students were amazed by the fact that parasites can manipulate the behaviour of the host. I finished with talking about several other interesting host-manipulating parasites systems: nematode-infected ants mimic fruit to attract birds; protozoan-infected mice are attracted to the urine of their predator cats; nematode-infected crickets commit suicide by jumping into the water to help the parasite emerging out…… It’s hard to imagine that these often unseen worms within the host have such big power to control the hosts in so many different ways for their own benefits. How brilliant these worms are! Then Leah gave the presentation about how to treat parasitic infections and gave an awesome explanation about what drug resistance is and how it gets worse and worse if you overtreat the animals.

After the presentation, we had 3 stations for students to visit. The first station run by Jeanie and Grace had actual samples of all kinds of parasites in different sizes and shapes. There were samples from tiny protozoans who are microscopic, to big tapeworms, who take up a full jar. This gave students a better idea of how parasites can look like and how diverse the parasites are. The students were excited to see the parasites in the bottles.

To enhance the science club members’ knowledge of parasites that they gained, at the second station Teresa Emmett and myself had a parasite themed board game designed by  HPI members for students to play. The goal of the game was to use an animal character to travel through the map and land home safely with the minimum number of parasites. The parasite cards in this game had all kinds of information about how the parasite is transmitted, diseases it causes and the symptoms.

Last but not least, we had another game run by Leah and Susan to demonstrate how drug resistance develops with consistent treatment of the animals unnecessarily using a metaphorical cow and two sizes of plastic beads for susceptible and resistant worms. Students were able to decide whether to treat their animals or not in different circumstances. This allowed them to think and balance the profit and the drug resistance when making the treatment decisions.

Overall, the event was really successful. We heard a lot of good feedback from the students and the teacher. “All the activities were nice, engaging and fun,” commented by a student, and they want more classroom visits from the HPI group in the future. It is always a nice experience to share our enthusiasm about parasites with the public and potential future researchers. Thanks to Teresa, Leah and Jeanie for planning this awesome event!