Parasitology is a discipline of biology devoted to the study of parasites, their hosts and the relationship between them. In view of the diseases parasites cause in humans, more attention tends to be devoted to those species parasitic in man. Animal parasitology on the other hand is only of interest when it deals with the parasitic infections of domestic and game animals, especially where the possibility of a zoonosis exist. In Nigeria, the curriculum for teaching parasitology is skewed in favour of human parasitology (public health parasitology), which deals mainly with parasites of public health importance. Only very few Nigerian parasitologists have shown interest in animal parasitology as a field of research. Mention must be made of the pioneering work of researchers like Bert B. Babero and Ikedinachuku Okpala who investigated the parasites of the Agama lizard (Babero and Okpala, 1962a, b), Ben A. Obiamiwe and his collaborators who published papers on the parasites of small mammals from Edo and Delta States (Obiamiwe, 1986; Ugbomoiko and Obiamiwe, 1991a, b; Ugbomoiko, 1997; Ugbomoiko et al., 2000). I must confess that these publications stirred my interest in investigating the parasites of amphibians. I observed that despite the abundance and diversity of amphibians in Nigeria, very little work had been done on their parasites and what was known of them was from studies undertaken by foreign workers (Thurston, 1967, 1970; Avery, 1971; Jackson and Tinsley, 1995a, b, 1998a, b). A paper on the parasites of Dicroglossus occipitalis (Oladimeji et al., 1988-1990), perhaps represent the first publication by an indigenous investigator. The paper “Endoparasites of amphibians in south-western Nigeria” published by our team in 2001 was the first detailed study of amphibian parasites in Nigeria (Aisien et al., 2001). Thereafter, there has been a steady growth of published information on the parasitic infections of amphibians from different ecological biotopes in Nigeria.
