The Influence of Lamb Gender on Faecal Egg Count Exposed to Natural Gastrointestinal Nematode Parasite Infection

Abuargob O1* , Stear M2 , Mitchell S2 , Benothman M1

Animal Medicine Department, Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, University of Tripoli, Libya 2 Institute of Biodiversity, Animal Health and Comparative Medicine, Garscube Campus, University of Glasgow, Scotland

Corresponding author: E. mail: omarymilad@hotmail.com

Abstract :

The aim of this paper is to investigate the influence of sex differences in transformative fecal egg count in lambs following natural gastrointestinal nematode infection. A flock of 758 straight bred Scottish Black face lambs was studied for a period of three years at monthly intervals between August to October in which, approximately equal numbers of castrated male and female lambs were used in this experiment. The lambs were born from mid-April to early May and weaned at 4 months of age. This study has shown that the fecal egg counts in male lambs were consistently higher than female lambs at 6-months of age(P<0.05). The distribution of transformed fecal egg counts in male and female lambs of each month over three years revealed that the majority of the lambs had relatively few egg counts and a small number had very high egg counts and the variations in both genders varies among years. The results are consistent with the idea that faecal egg counts are a useful marker for nematode resistances in natural infection and emphasizes the importance of lambs sex for development of control strategies.