This website is designed and deployed to report the results and distribute the data collected as part of an All Taxa Biodiversity Inventory in the Big Thicket National Preserve in southeastern Texas. The work described herein is focused on the parasites of fishes and aquatic herpetiles, although this website only includes information on fish parasites at this time.

Our research team consists of faculty and undergraduate research students at Peru State College, as well as collaborators in several states and countries. Our goal is to document, and when necessary describe, nearly all of the parasite species occurring in fishes resident within the Big Thicket National Preserve and areas within the historical Big Thicket.

This is a long-term project that promises to uncover numerous previously undescribed parasite species, significantly improve the holdings of our public lending museums of parasitology, and test interesting and informative hypotheses regarding the effectiveness of the preserve in protecting the species and interspecific interactions crucial to healthy aquatic ecosystems.

Browse around, send questions or suggestions, and utilize the resources made available by this project at your leisure. We hope you find it interesting and useful.