The Research Team onsite at the transfer station ,left to right Hannah Baker,Laurel Nolan,Dr Fidelis Achenjang.[/caption]
Fidelis first encountered these elusive creatures in 1996. At the time, he was a professor at the University of Dschang in his home country of Cameroon. Local people knew all too well about RTMs and the stomach pain and other ailments they could cause, but his colleagues in the entomology department said they had never seen them before.
He asked a surgeon friend what he thought about these larvae, which have bodies roughly one to two centimeters long with “tails” of the same length or longer, impacting human health.
“He thought they were too big to be a parasite for humans,” Fidelis says.
This gap between scientific knowledge and local folk wisdom compelled him to keep searching for answers, and he eventually met a traditional healer who regularly treated patients for intestinal infestation, or myiasis. The healer invited Fidelis and the surgeon to witness a treatment. Young children sick with digestive upset came to the healer for help, and he gave them a remedy to induce vomiting. In this, Fidelis and the surgeon saw the rat-tailed maggots expelled from the bodies of the children, who recovered from their illness soon after.
Fidelis and the surgeon partnered with the healer to learn from him and collect data about his sightings of RTMs. They developed a questionnaire for his patients, and Fidelis also had his students at Dschang take it around to different parts of the country when they were on holiday from school. [caption id="attachment_110125" align="alignnone" width="624"]
Dr Fidelis Achenjang in Lab[/caption]
“We wanted to know how extensive this was,” Fidelis says.
In the French zone, where raffia palms are common, RTMs are well-known because the rotting bark of this species makes an excellent habitat for these larvae. When Fidelis learned this, he worked with local people to collect RTMs from the palms. He was able to preserve many samples and also grew some adult flies from the larvae, which he also preserved.“I had the fly and the maggots, but no eggs,” he says.
As time went on, Fidelis collected anecdotal evidence of RTMs from all around the world but found that scientific research was still lacking. It became clear that the best way to bridge the gap between local wisdom and scientific knowledge was to collect many samples of all phases of the RTM life cycle so that entomologists could thoroughly study the characteristics of the species and help others to finally recognize the tiny decomposers and pseudo-parasites that have been here all along.
Due to years of civil war, Fidelis has not been able to return to Cameroon for some time, and his colleagues have become “blessed memories,” as he says. These difficult conditions, along with the balancing act of pursuing a career while raising his five children, have made it challenging to continue collecting samples and pursuing this passion project. Still, his desire to raise awareness of RTMs has never left him. [caption id="attachment_110126" align="alignnone" width="624"]
A sample of Fidelis's RTMs from Cameroon[/caption]
They were beginning to think they would never actually find RTMs, when on June 21, they decided to return to the garbage transfer station where they had previously found regular tail-less maggots writhing in the shallow puddles of leakage from compacted trash. It was a sunny day after a spell of rain, and they thought maybe, just maybe, with more of that foul water sitting around, they’d have a better chance of finding their prized maggots.
The three of them were crouching over a muddy puddle beside a dumpster, wearing the fluorescent yellow vests they’d been advised to wear for safety, when, after stirring up the water a bit with a stick, the long sought-after RTMs wriggled up to the surface.
The team's first sighting of RTMs in Appalachia[/caption]
“Once we have good samples of all the life phases, we will send them to an entomology lab to do the systematics,” he says. “This means we will see which flies are really responsible for this in terms of genomes, in terms of, family, and so on.”
At the conclusion of their summer research, Hannah and Laurel created a presentation of their findings. They shared this at Union as well as at Lee University's McNair-Ledford Undergraduate Research Symposium this semester. This was the first time the Lee Symposium had been open to Ledford Scholars, so this part of the project was a new experience for both Hannah and Laurel.
“It was a really good experience to learn how to make a poster like that and present it to different judges and answer questions about our work,” Hannah says.
“Even learning how to prepare a proposal and how to build relationships with colleagues have really helped me,” Laurel says of her combined experiences with Ledford.
“They are happy with their work,” Fidelis says. “We have found something very useful.”
While RTM infestation is mostly a health concern for those who do not have access to clean drinking water, children and animals are always at risk because they may play in and drink out of mud puddles or other contaminated areas. Raising awareness of RTMs’ existence and their ability to hide at the bottom of deeper water due to their long respiratory “tails” could prevent unnecessary illness here in Appalachia as well as around the world. “From a medical standpoint, this was really interesting,” Hannah says, explaining that she will bring her new awareness of RTMs and her deepened understanding of parasitology into her future work with patients. [caption id="attachment_110128" align="alignnone" width="624"]
Hannah and Laurel presenting at the Lee Symposium[/caption]
Fidelis says that once more is known about the maggots, there could be many applications of the knowledge, including creating antibiotics from their DNA or intentionally farming them to grow an inexpensive fish food. Mostly though, he is driven by scientific inquiry and the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, a message he drives home to his students. “We are always learning,” he says.
