The project examines the parasites of Australia's most common freshwater turtles. Turtles are an evolutionarily ancient group with a fascinating and diverse parasite fauna. It is anticipated that the project will recover representatives of six major parasite groups (phyla) and a substantial majority of the more than 100 parasite species thought to be new to science. Parasites will be collected, cataloged, identified and described as part of the project and deposited to form a public specimen base in both Australia and the United States. Although these parasites have been implicated in host disease almost nothing is known about them outside of North America.
Information and data from these studies will be made available directly to Australian turtle researchers and to the public through the project's WWW site. In addition to uncovering unknown aspects of Australia's biodiversity the project will generate data and specimens necessary to test a variety of hypotheses concerning parasite biodiversity, biogeography and evolution. These hypotheses provide synthetic areas of study ideal for training broadly educated students. Data from the project will inform not only studies of biodiversity, ecology and evolution, but also will be valuable to regulatory agencies involved in turtle conservation.
