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A Contribution to the Life History of Bucephalus longicornutus (Manter, 1954)

The Mature Metacercaria — (Text-fig. 8, A-L.)

The Mature Metacercaria
(Text-fig. 8, A-L.)

The natural fish host or hosts of the metacercariae were not discovered during the course of this study. In general, attempts were made to obtain and examine fish that fell within the size range of those successfully infected experimentally. Three attempts were made to obtain likely fish hosts from Balaena Bay, Wellington Harbour, where infected oysters are known to occur, but no fish were recovered from the fish traps used. Ten specimens of Tripterygion sp., collected with a dip net from the same locality, were not infected with metacercariae of the present species.

Small fish are not common in oyster "cultch" from oyster dredges working in Foveaux Strait. In one day spent dredging on the vessel Kumea, only 11 specimens of Trachelochismus sp. and four specimens of Acanthoclinus trilineatus (Forster) were recovered by the author but none of these proved to be infected. A day spent trawling over the oyster beds in Foveaux Strait yielded, in addition to the larger fish species listed elsewhere (p. 33), 30 small fish comprising 25 specimens of Trachelochismus sp., three specimens of Tripterygion sp. and two specimens of A. trilineatus. None of these specimens proved to be infected.

Experimentally infected specimens of A. quadridactylus and Tripterygion sp. provided the only source of metacercariae for study. For reasons stated elsewhere (p. 26), the following description is based on 80-day-old and older specimens.