Dan just spent three weeks in northern Senegal helping conduct field work and train lab personnel in parasite identification for a project ran by PIs from Stanford (Susanne Sokolow, Giulio De Leo) and UCSB (Armand Kuris). Human blood fluke infections (schistosomiasis) rose dramatically in this area following the construction of a dam on the Senegal River that blocked snail-eating prawns from migrating upriver. Snails are the intermediate host for blood flukes; removing their natural predators caused snails, and the blood flukes that infect them, to proliferate. The US PIs and the Senegalese non-profit Espoir Pour la Santé (Hope for Health) have partnered to assess whether blood fluke transmission can be reduced by reintroducing these natural predators.