couple questions on fecal floatation

I have a bottle of sodium nitrate powder, I am not too sure how to get it to a gravity=1.20 solution. If I use 100ml of water and weigh it, it'll be 100g; do I just add the powder in until the scale reads 120g? Is this right?

My second question is: Can you use the floatation method to test whether a feeder insect carries parasite?

Thanks.
Bonnie

Bonnie-

When I do fecal floats I use a product made for the procedure called "fecasol". I am not sure about the sodium nitrate powder stuff.

I have never done a fecal float on feeder insects and I'm not exactly sure how you would do it. I guess crush up the bug in the fecasol and then do the same thing as you would when doing a regular fecal float? Interesting question that I wish I had an answer to.

Ok, I see this post has been moved to another forum. I do like the fact that you can still read the title of the post in the Leopard Gecko forum and when you click on it you are able to read the thread in the forum it was moved to.

I have a bottle of sodium nitrate powder, I am not too sure how to get it to a gravity=1.20 solution. If I use 100ml of water and weigh it, it'll be 100g; do I just add the powder in until the scale reads 120g? Is this right?

You want the specific gravity to be 1.2? You need to use a hydrometer (i think this is the correct term) like for saltwater fish tanks. I would use molarity to represent concentration......

Yep, a hydrometer is the gadget you need to use to measure specific gravity.

Fecal flotation media is formulated to a specific gravity that will allow ova and oocytes of parasites to float, while the fecal material will not. There are lots of parts of an insect that will float right along with the ova and oocyts. If you are looking for indirect life-cycle parasites that are carried by the insects, then you are looking for infective larvae. These larvae probably will not float.

I'm not sure how you would use a fecal float to check feeder insects for parasites. I would think that you would have all sorts of artifact stuff floating and it would be an extremely difficult slide to read. You sort of need to know what you are looking for and in what part of the feeder insect it would be found, then you would need to examine that part of the insect to find infective larvae.

You might be able to crush the insects into a saline solution, then filter it through a fine mesh screen that has mesh large enough for the larvae to pass through, but the insect parts won't. Then centrifuge the filtered specimen, stain it and prepare a smear. I'm not sure how effective that would be...never tried it.

It seems like the easiest solution is to just do a float or a smear from the feces of the reptile and see what it has. Once you've identified a parasite, then it should be an easy matter to deduce where it came from, if you know the life-cycle.