Collaborative Research: RUI: Parasites of Australian Turtles: Unknown Aspects of Biodiversity

该项目研究了澳大利亚最常见的淡水龟的寄生虫。海龟是一个进化上古老的群体，有着迷人而多样的寄生动物群。预计该项目将恢复六个主要寄生虫群（门）的代表和被认为是科学新的100多种寄生虫物种中的绝大多数。作为该项目的一部分，将收集、编目、鉴定和描述寄生虫，并将其存放在澳大利亚和美国，以形成一个公共标本库。虽然这些寄生虫与宿主疾病有关，但在北美以外的地区几乎一无所知。这些研究的资料和数据将通过该项目的万维网网址直接提供给澳大利亚海龟研究人员和公众。除了揭示澳大利亚生物多样性的未知方面外，该项目还将产生必要的数据和标本，以检验有关寄生虫生物多样性、寄生虫地理学和进化的各种假设。这些假设为培养受过广泛教育的学生提供了理想的综合研究领域。该项目的数据不仅将为生物多样性、生态学和进化研究提供信息，而且对参与海龟保护的监管机构也很有价值。

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.