Quail Guard
Just approved by the FDA. Hopefully it helps the birds in West Texas rebound.
https://quailguard.com/
Within months, Kendall and his grad students at Tech zeroed in on a gruesome finding: wild quail in the Rolling Plains were teeming with parasitic worms. In many of the birds he and his team trapped in the wild and then analyzed, dozens, if not hundreds, of threadworms were feeding in an area of the intestine called the cecum. A similar worm had infested the quails’ eyes. In severe cases, Kendall could see dozens of white, string-like worms, growing up to half an inch long, wriggling both around and within the birds’ eyeballs. It turned out that quail ingest the worms’ larvae when they eat insects, particularly grasshoppers and crickets. Within fifteen minutes, the larvae crawl out of the quail’s crop (the muscular pouch where birds temporarily store food), up the esophagus and nasal passages, and through glands into the eyes, where they feast on protein-rich blood. The worms remain there, maturing and mating in the eyes, until the host quail becomes so weak it can’t escape from predators, or it falls victim to some other malady.
Some ranchers had reported seeing quail flying into trees and fences, which indicated that worms were blinding them. Hunters were also shooting wild quail that had empty eye sockets. Scientists had known about eyeworms in quail since the sixties, but for mysterious reasons, the parasites seemed to have reached epidemic levels. In 2014, Kendall began to publish his findings on eyeworms in peer-reviewed journals, and the media took notice. “Blood-Sucking Eyeworm Caused Drastic Quail Decline” was the headline at TexasMonthly.com.
Kendall then set out to find a treatment. This February, after five years of research, he announced that he had developed the first medicated feed specifically devised to kill parasitic worms in wild quail. Kendall’s researchers have been testing the medicine, which he calls QuailGuard, both in their lab at Texas Tech and in their “mobile lab,” a cargo trailer retrofitted with equipment they can haul to area ranches to nonlethally test quail for worms in the field. Federal patent records show that QuailGuard is a blend of grain and fenbendazole, a drug commonly used to kill worms in dogs, cats, fish, and livestock. “We know it works, and we know it’s safe,” said Cassie Henry, a PhD student participating in the studies.
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Originally Posted by walt4dun
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