What were you trying to find out about this new species? And was there anything you found that surprised you along the way?

What we really wanted to know was where is this new species and what animals does it infect? We knew that had been in the Yukon and the Northwest Territories and Wolverines.

A previous PhD student in the lab had found that.

But my PhD continued his work and we wanted to further characterize it.

So we set out to test more animals from the Yukon and Northwest territories, as well as test new areas like Alaska and Nunavut to see its geographic range across the North.

And the traditional gold standard diagnostic method that was used couldn't differentiate T. chantillensis from trigonella nativa, which is a problem because they have an overlapping range, which meant that a second diagnostic method was required.

This was slow and tedious and could only be done on a very small subset of larvae.

Yeah, how does a parasite end up on the wrong side of the world, so to speak? And what does it tell us about a globalized planet?