Sevilleta National Wildlife Refuge

The Sevilleta National Wildlife Refuge is a protected park in New Mexico located in the Chihuahuan desert around 20 miles north of Socorro, New Mexico. The Rio Salado flows through the refuge and is a tributary of the Rio Grande joining the Rio Grande just 15 miles north of Socorro, New Mexico. The refuge area currently hosts the Sevilleta Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) Program by the University of New Mexico. While research into parasites in mammals mainly rodents (Wilson et al., 1997) and other species that habituate in the Sevilleta National Wildlife Refuge has been done, there has not been any studies on snails and digenean parasites in the region. Understanding and mapping the physid snail and digenean parasite habitat could help
The ponds originally started out as a bait farm that supplied fishers with worms and carp for bait fishing. However, in 1962 the Phillips bought it and turned it into a local fishing spot. The Phillips refurbished the bait farm to a local fishing, ecosystem by cleaning up the water with both an artificial filtration system and with a natural filtration system consisting of certain plants, lilies plants and fish to keep the waters clean. Included in the this man made ecosystem are game fish, like rainbow trout and black fish this turned the ponds into a favorite local fishing spot where the whole family can have fun fishing, and enjoying this picturesque scenery. However, even though the waters are somewhat clean and well maintained with numerous natural and man-made filters, it still has a population of snails that carry digenean parasites. The digenean parasites are a large group of parasites that include both non-infectious parasites, to infectious parasites. The snail parasite population living in Shady Lakes is non-infectious to humans, but may be an important model system for similarly related parasites such as Schistosoma, which causes the disease Schistosomiasis in humans.

Schistosomiasis is a parasitic disease caused by blood flukes (trematodes) of the genus Schistosoma. After malaria and intestinal helminthiasis, schistosomiasis is the third most devastating tropical disease
The BLAST results were used to select a subset of taxa from a previous dataset of concatenated digenean 18S and 28S sequences (Brant et al., 2006) to provide relevant ingroups and outgroups for alignment with the experimentally obtained parasite-derived sequences (alignments available on request). Phylogenetic analyses using standard methods of maximum parsimony (MP), maximum likelihood (ML), and minimum evolution (ME) were carried out using PAUP* ver. 4.0b1019 (Swofford, 2001). Modeltest was used to determine the best nucleotide substitution model based on Akaike information criteria for the combined data for use in ML and ME analyses (Posada and Crandall, 1998). The following model was selected: GTR+I+G. Gaps were treated as missing data information residues. Parsimony trees were reconstructed using heuristic searches (100 replicates), random taxon-input order, and tree-bisection and reconnection (TBR) branch swapping. Optimal ME and ML trees were determined from heuristic searches (10 replicates), random taxon-input order, and TBR. Nodal support was estimated by bootstrap (500 replicates) and was determined for MP, ME, and ML trees using heuristic searches (10 replicates for both MP and ME; 5 replicates for ML), each with random taxon-input