Inhibited development of Ostertagia ostertagi in Australia related to survival over summer in the host or on pasture

During autumn and winter, separate pasture plots were seeded with Ostertagia ostertagi eggs produced by worms which had persisted in the host over summer as inhibited larvae, or which had developed directly from larvae acquired from pasture in late summer. Successive groups of parasite-free calves grazed the plots in spring for 14 days at 4-week intervals and were killed for worm counts 14 days after removal from pasture. The proportion of inhibited early 4th-stage larvae was substantially greater in calves which grazed the plot carrying the progeny of previously inhibited worms. This finding is more easily reconciled with differential survival on pasture over spring and summer of inhibiting and non-inhibiting morphs, than with the concept of a physiological switch from inhibiting to non-inhibiting behaviour in individual larvae.