Which came first. The tape worm or the egg.

 Since you folks liked my first set of pictures I thought you might like to see some more of them. These pictures are from actual specimens that I have personally seen and photographed in the last month or so. The picture above is an egg from a tape worm. I call it a Taenia egg. There are some other things that people eat that can look just like these eggs but my job is to tell the eggs from the  “poop chunk’s”. I pointed out 4 lines in the egg that I believe are actually hooks that will develop when the egg hatches. These hook will attach inside the intestine so that the tape worm can hang on for dear life.   Below is a picture from the same sample of another tape worm egg. You can see a yellow sac around it. I don’t often see them this way but this is the form they take while they are still in the tape worm. I would assume that this person still has a live tape worm that is producing eggs…  

~ by daddyvaughn on March 28, 2008.