LEXINGTON - Results of a University of Kentucky study released Tuesday bolster the theory that the eastern tent caterpillar is to blame for hundreds of foal losses over the past two years.

        The nine-day trial involved 11 mares in late stages of pregnancy, all of which were confined to stalls, fed hay, had access to clean drinking water and were walked daily.

        Six were given 50 grams of crushed caterpillars mixed with saline by nasal tube once a day for nine days. The other five were given nothing but normal saline for nine days.

        All six mares given the caterpillar solution lost pregnancies. Five aborted during the trial while the sixth lost its pregnancy six days after the trial had ended.

        All of the mares in the control group, which were not exposed to caterpillars, maintained their pregnancies.

        “I think it's now safe to say that if we give caterpillars to pregnant mares and nothing else, it likely will cause abortions,” said Dr. Neil Williams, a veterinary pathologist at the school's Livestock Disease Diagnostic Center.

        “At this point, we still don't know exactly why this occurs or how much exposure is needed to bring about the losses. But we're sure that the caterpillars are not the fuzzy, harmless creatures we once thought they were.”

        In an earlier experiment on mares in early pregnancy, four of five mares that ingested crushed caterpillars lost pregnancies within 13 days. Ten others, five that were given the caterpillar's droppings - or frass - and five that were given only water, kept their pregnancies.

        Williams stressed that the results of the study are preliminary and that they do not rule out other causal factors.

        In late April 2001, pregnant mares began delivering weak foals that needed days of medical treatment to survive if they lived at all. In the following weeks, hundreds of foals died and thousands of mares lost early-term pregnancies to the illness, dubbed Mare Reproductive Loss Syndrome.

        By the time the deaths subsided, about 3.8 percent of the state's 2001 foal crop and 15 percent of the foals that would have been born on Kentucky farms this spring were lost.

        Scientists and farm managers saw evidence of the disease this year but not at the epidemic levels it plagued the state last year.

        According to the diagnostic center, only 165 equine abortions showing symptoms consistent with the syndrome were submitted for examination between December 30 and June 29. More than 500 were submitted during the same period last year.

        “I was certainly skeptical of the caterpillar being the cause coming into this year,” said Dr. Stuart Brown, a veterinary practitioner from Hagyard-Davidson-McGee Equine Hospital in Lexington.

        “But this year I have no doubt. The farms that sprayed, cut down trees or took other precautions against the caterpillars were fine. Where I had caterpillars, I had losses.”

        Farms did not experience as many losses this year because caterpillars did not invade in the massive numbers they did in 2001, said Dr. Thomas Tobin, a toxicology and pharmacology researcher at the university's Gluck Equine Research Center.

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