Information regarding the Theodorides gregarine collection that is now housed in the HWML is presented below.

The objective of the project was to transfer the worlds most complete collection of preserved gregarine parasites (micro-protozoan or protistan parasites of insects and other invertebrates) from an orphan collection in France to the Harold W. Manter Laboratory of Parasitology (HWML). Funds provided by the National Science Foundation (Research Collections in Systematics and Ecology, Grant Number: DEB 93-18444) were used to send one person (Rich Clopton) to France to prepare and ship the collection back to the HWML in Nebraska. NSF funds were also used to update the collection in the HWML databases and to accession and catalog the specimens into the HWML general collection.

The transfer of this collection saved from destruction the largest known series of type and voucher specimens of gregarines. The specimens will be available in the HWML for the future and many of the slides contain specimens collected from areas that have been adversely impacted by human development and from which no additional material will be available in the future. In other words, many of these species that were transferred to the HWML now represent extinct species of invertebrate endoparasites.

References.

Information on the availability of these specimens is available by writing to the Curator of the HWML. Announcements will be sent out to several list-servers in the web environment.