Monday, October 19, 2020

Case of the Week 611

 This week's lovely case is from Dr. Phillip Heaton. The following was submitted to his laboratory for identification. What is shown here? And what does the red arrow in the first image point to?

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Just surfing the web when the tablet pinged. Nice sample, a female one bearing her egg. Back when I was still practicing (did I do it for real?),we always had a joke whenever we had this one. Crab! Eventually the Brazilian style of deforestation did a resolute loss of habitat to Pththirus pubis and in an economical way enhanced the sanitary level of man.
Florida Fan

Anonymous said...

Hi! I would say a Phthirus pubis female with an egg, maybe?

Bernardino Rocha said...

Agree with Phthirus pubis or papillon d'amour (in french everything sounds better)bearing an egg.

Sam said...

This is Pthirus pubis (pubic or crab louse). My guess is that the arrow is pointing to an egg? Not the best at entomology!

Kosta Y. Mumcuoglu said...

As Sam indicated Pthirus is written without an h after P and not Phthirus, If you open the Phthiraptera Info (http://phthiraptera.info/content/taxonomy-human-lice) you will find the following paragraph....The Pubic Louse was first described and named in 1758, by Linnaeus as Pediculus pubis. In 1815 Leach established the genus Pthirus, and included therein a single species; Pediculus (sic Pthirus) pubis Linnaeus. It is not clear if Leach, or the type-setter, dropped the first "h" in the Greek word Phthirus. Two years later Leach referred to this species as "Phthirus" pubis (Linnaeus). From that time to the present, the generic name has been spelled both ways. However, the generic name was fixed in 1958 as Pthirus (Hemming, 1958, in "Official List of Generic Names in Zoology," Opinion 104). Thus the binomial name for the Pubic Louse is Pthirus pubis (Linnaeus, 1758). No other scientific names are acceptable.....

Anonymous said...

For sure it’s a female Pthirus pubis, not only because she bears an egg but also as pointed out by Dr. Pritt in a previous case, the posterior is somewhat concave or flat, the male one has a rounded convex posterior.
Florida Fan

Anonymous said...

So cute Pthirus pubis! Can't believe they're still around (long time no see).

Old One said...

Last time I saw some was when some clever student placed some live ones at our P. pubis station on louse lab day.