Receiving an unsolicited photo of worm-infested animal poop would make anyone cringe, unless you’re a parasite expert like Katrina Lohan. When a colleague sent her a snapshot of a watery pile of feces with a fire-engine red worm inside, she was instantly intrigued.

“She sent this to me and was like, ‘I think this is a parasite, are you interested in studying river otters?’ And I was like, ‘Ooh, I think that’s a parasite too. And yes, I am,’” Lohan, a parasite ecologist who leads the Coastal Disease Ecology Laboratory at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC), told Gizmodo.

Her colleague discovered the otter scat on a dock at the SERC campus on the Chesapeake Bay. Scientists know surprisingly little about river otters that live in tidally influenced coastal areas, but these

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