![]() Question: Is there an easy way to determine if blood flukes are currently in my favorite swimming area?Īnswer: Not really. This is a far greater threat to Flathead Lake’s ecosystem and recreational cannonballers than swimmer’s itch could ever be. Not only did those efforts fail at reducing swimmer’s itch, but many of the lakes were polluted with toxic chemicals in the process. Waterfowl and snail eradication has been tried in other lakes. Question: If the blood flukes aren’t a nuisance to humans until they’ve passed through a merganser and been released from a snail, can’t we just get rid of the mergansers and snails?Īnswer: No. It’s a lot to process, I know, so let me do my best to address any additional questions you may have. It isn’t long before red and itchy bumps start popping up on your body like tiny, irritated memorials commemorating where a tiny blood fluke has died. For some people, upon discovering this sudden arrival of blood fluke corpses, the immune system overreacts - which, I think we can all agree, is a completely understandable response. The human body is inhospitable to these parasites, and they die seconds after boring into your skin. When you get out of the water and begin to air dry, the flukes sense this, penetrate your skin and burrow inside.įortunately, you’re not a giant waterfowl. Mistaking you for a giant waterfowl of some kind, the blood fluke cercariae attach themselves to your exposed skin. Meanwhile, you just happen to be perfecting your cannonball technique from your family cabin dock. They have only one aim: Find a merganser, mature into adulthood within the merganser’s blood, and start the cycle over again. Over the next few months, over 250,000 blood fluke cercariae can be released from a single infected snail. When the miracidia find their unsuspecting snail, they invade it and begin to asexually reproduce into their next life stage called cercariae. ![]() Once these eggs reach the water, tiny larvae called miracidia hatch and immediately go on the hunt for the freshwater snails of the Flathead Lake ecosystem. Less than a millimeter in length, blood flukes begin their life cycle as eggs that are released with the feces of infected waterfowl or mammals, which in Flathead Lake are often mergansers. Still with me? Well hold on, because we haven’t even scratched the surface yet. Here’s the unflinching truth: swimmer’s itch, officially known as cercarial dematitis, is caused by an immune system response to the penetration of human skin by parasites known as blood flukes. It wasn’t until I joined the University of Montana’s Flathead Lake Biological Station (FLBS) that I learned the horrific reality festering inside those little red bumps. For the longest time that’s actually what I assumed swimmer’s itch was - a simple reaction to some kind of irritant like algae or an underwater plant. It’s an allergic reaction, in other words, not unlike the body’s response to poison ivy. They typically manifest as mosquito bite-like bumps that emerge wherever lake water has air-dried on the skin. In reality, swimmer’s itch symptoms aren’t quite so dramatic. “They got swimmer’s itch after cannonballing off of their family cabin dock.”Īt the time I had no personal swimmer’s itch experiences to fall back on, so these tales often left me no choice but to imagine poor so-and-so in a hospital bed, pockmarked and malformed by their terrifying encounter with the infamous itch of the swimmer. “Did you hear about so-and-so,” a fellow fifth-grader might say, in a tone reserved only for the scariest of ghost stories. ![]() Prepare yourselves, Leader readers, because this column is bound to get under your skin.Īs someone who grew up in Montana, my childhood summers were peppered with mysterious swimmer’s itch tales. From peeling sunburns to mosquito bites, many of the inflamed epidermal threats we experience are widely known and well understood by local residents and out-of-state visitors alike.īut there’s another cutaneous offender that exists more in the realm of local folklore than the rest - one that resides in the shoreline waters of Flathead Lake and other freshwater bodies, and starts to emerge when summer temperatures approach their peak. Here in Montana, itchy skin has always been an unavoidable consequence when enjoying the great outdoors. ![]()
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