During my stay at the Zoological Station of Wimereux, Pas de Calais, France, in August 1934, I made a special study of Protozoa parasitic in marine fishes. The examination of ten specimens of youngRaia batisrevealed a coccidial infection in two individuals, measuring about 25 cm. in length. In one of these the mucus in the terminal portion of the intestine contained a few unsegmented spherical oocysts, with diameters from 24 to 28μ. Sections of different portions of the intestine and of the liver failed to exhibit any stages of schizogony or gametogony, evidently owing to the fact that there was a single infection at the end-phase. However, the second skate showed very numerous unsegmented oocysts in the posterior portion of the alimentary canal (Pl. I, fig. 1). This specimen provided material for the morphological study and biological observations which follow.
In a memoir on human and animal schistosomiasis (1934c), I reported the presence of bovine schistosomes for the first time in the Belgian Congo (Elisabethville). I also expressed the opinion that the bovine schistosomiasis in Katanga was of Rhodesian origin. It came from that same region from which Veglia & Leroux in 1929 described a new schistosome of Bovidae and Ovidae under the name Schislosoma mattheei, a species which has since given rise to some controversy. The material I brought back from Elisabethville readily lent itself to a morphological study of the two African bovine schistosomes.
Two new species of coccidia belonging to the genus Wenyonella are diagnosed here by the characters of their oocysts. Wenyonella uelensis and W. parva are geographically related (Uele, Belgian Congo) to the type species, W. africana Hoare (Uganda). By their hosts, two rodents of which one is a terrestrial squirrel, one can relate them to the second species, W. hoarei found in an Indian squirrel by Ray & Das Gupta. W. uelensis is sharply differentiated from the two previously known species, W. africana and W. hoarei, by its oval form, whilst W. parva is noticeably smaller.
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