On October 30, the second meeting with schoolchildren on parasitology was held at the A.N. Severtsov Institute of Ecology and Evolution of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Lyudmila Alekseevna Limantseva, PhD in Biology, research fellow, and Maria Sergeevna Plykina, postgraduate student, junior research fellow at the Laboratory of Phytoparasitology of the IEE RAS, spoke about parasites that live on plants.
The lecture mainly focused on nematodes that affect plants. Nematodes are the second most diverse group in the animal kingdom after insects. They also discussed species diagnostics of nematodes and the features of individual methods. In the second part of the meeting, they discussed in more detail how nematodes affect medicinal crops using mint as an example.
In the practical part, schoolchildren were able to independently isolate Ditylenchus destructor nematodes from an infected potato tuber. They also examined various soil nematodes under a microscope: they practiced distinguishing phytophages from other trophic groups, distinguishing larvae and adult individuals, and among the latter, distinguishing females and males. During an informal discussion, they learned what work on phytoparasitology is being carried out at the Institute.
