Quick question

[The Grebe]

I was cleaning a walleye that came out of Mille Lacs yesterday, a nice 18 incher and it had a good sized perch in it's stomach. It got me to thinking about something...

Now here's my question...If the walleyes and pike and muskie eat the perch and the perch have worms, how come the eaters don't get worms from the eatees?

[RobertELee]

I would think the stomach acids are strong enough to kill them.

[john.wells]

worms can withstand stomach acid quite well, in fact so much so that pickling in vinegar won't kill them. From what I have read, certain worms don't affect all species. There are hosts and carriers and a specific life cycle to each parasite. For instance, there is a parasite that proliferates in northern pike, and can (and will) carry over to humans to complete its life cycle. It is a tapeworm that other fish don't carry (at least from what I remember). There is an article in the Minnesota DNR Conservation Volunteer that explains it quite well. I posted in the Recipe section of this site, and the moderator put a link up to the article. I will try to find it again and see if it will get linked on this thread as it is useful information.

[john.wells]

OK- found the stuff. Go to the DNR HSOforum. (dnr.state.mn.us) and in the search box type in "fish parasites". The first link will be an article called "you don't want to eat that raw". Click on that for all of the info you will probably need about fish parasites. Also, there is an adendum to the article regarding pickling fish. Once again, go to the search box and type in "pickling". The first link you can choose will be the adendum to the article. When you click on it, you will be given a choice on downloading. Just click open, and a wordpad document explaining that deep freezing for a certain amount of time at a certain minimum temperature will kill all of the nasties as good as cooking. Hopefully one of the moderators will link both up. In my opinion, it should be a sticky topic in the sharing recipes forum . Hope this helps!

[The Grebe]

JW....I read that article in the Volunteer and I have been aware of the one parasite cycle, fish to birds, droppings from birds to snails, back to fish and so on.

I also read that a person ingesting that tape worm parasite that pickiling doesn't kill, promptly put the kibosh on any further pickling of pike on my end!

I haven't done it for quite a few years now and I figure that if I had ingested anything, it would have manifested itself by now.

But I would think that the other fish would have the same suseptability to the worms as sunnies, perch, whitefish, etc., yet I don't believe I have ever caught and cleaned a pike, crappie, or a walleye that had those grubs?

Mille Lacs walleyes have alot of tapeworms and I've heard that they get them from the crayfish they eat, yet I catch alot of walleyes out of the rivers and they eat crayfish and I seldom get one that has anything close to what Mille Lacs has...yet, yet, I have never caught a perch out of Mille Lacs that has had tapeworms? Go figure?