THE TURKEY IMPORTANT IN THE SPREAD OF GAPEWORMS. 3 
a year old. That turkeys above 3 years of age may harbor gape- 
worms is established by the fact that a turkey which was kept at the 
Bureau of Animal Industry Experiment Station, Bethesda, Md., for 
three years after it was brought there was found after its death to 
be infested with a pair of gapeworms. 
EXPERIMENTAL WORK. 
Experiments in artificially infecting chickens of various ages with 
gapeworms were carried out as follows: To provide material for 
infecting the chickens, cultures were made at first from gapeworms 
collected from the tracheas of turkeys. Later many of the worms 
collected from the artificially infected chickens were also used in mak- 
ing cultures. The worms were chopped into small pieces and the 
eggs released by tearing apart the fragments of the uteri in a small 
quantity of water. The water containing particles of worms and the 
eggs was spread on the surface of a sterilized medium culture made 
from chicken feces mixed with powdered animal charcoal. This was 
kept moist in a petri dish and allowed to incubate at room tempera- 
ture. After about two weeks' incubation a large proportion of the 
eggs contained fully developed larvae, many of which commonly 
hatched and continued active for long periods after hatching. The 
cultures were then ready for use and were fed to the chickens by plac- 
ing small portions scraped from the surface of the culture medium 
directly into the mouth and making sure that the birds swallowed the 
material. The chickens used in the experiments, except the adults, 
were hatched in incubators and kept from exposure to gapeworm 
infection until used. Usually only one feeding was given, and in 
most cases the chicken, if it did not die earlier, was killed two weeks 
after feeding the infectious material. Occasionally chickens were 
killed for examination in less than two weeks after infection. The 
tracheas and lungs were examined for gapeworms, the latter by dis- 
section in physiological salt solution, a lens being used for the dis- 
covery of small, incompletely developed worms. Altogether 139 
chickens of different ages were thus fed infectious gapeworm 
material. The results are shown below. 
Results of artificially infecting chickens ivith gapeivorm material. 
Age of chickens when fed. 
Number 
fed. 
Number 
infected. 
Per cent 
infected. 
1 to 4 weeks 
47 
32 
32 
28 
41 
27 
21 
8 
87 
5 to 8 weeks 
84 
9 to 20 weeks 
66 
29 
