The use of echinostomes to study host-parasite relationships between larval trematodes and invertebrate and cold-blooded vertebrate hosts.

Echinostomes are intestinal trematodes with life cycles that are easy and inexpensive to maintain in the laboratory. For this reason, echinostomes have served for years as experimental models in different areas of parasitology. However, the usefulness of these trematodes in experimental parasitology has been under estimated. In this paper, we discuss the life cycles of echinostomes and the techniques used to maintain them in the laboratory. We further examine the characteristics of these trematodes that make them useful models for the analysis of larval parasite-host relationships. Echinostomes are useful for studies on the immunobiology of snails, host-finding processes of free-living larval stages, effects of larval trematode infections on anuran populations, and studies on analytes in the larval trematodes and their snail intermediate hosts.