i found a red worm imbedded in my crappie fillet ?
Would you eat it?

Crappie are nasty ...... the worm sounds tasty!

I caught one at Benbrook this year that had hundreds of those red worms running all through it. It was nasty, I threw it away. I wouldn't eat it, plenty without worms to eat.

extra protein, yum.

From the description, it sounds like a nematode (round worm).

Cooking will kill the worm, but if you have a desire to do some raw sushi (yum), these worms have such complex life cycles that I am highly doubtful that they would use man as their final host.

A lot of these use small crustaceans such as microscopic copepods as their intermediate host. From there, they make their journey into the flesh of fish when ingested. Because copepods are so prevalent in our lakes, it wouldn't be uncommon to have an infesation of those little guys in the flesh of fish.

So, I am sure the wildlife people will say the meat is edible. Cooking will kill the parasite. Like most parasites, they are host specific, so man is not part of the life cycle of these worms anyway.

Thank you for the information always learning something new on here. I am a country boy and have eatin worse. So I have removed the one worm I found and rinsed really well now time for cooking

That would be my answer, just cook it good, you would neve.r know the difference.

Cut around it

once itz cooked it aint gunna matter what kind a worm it was
but I would trim em out if I could ....

I cut a "decent" area of flesh surrounding it, and move along. If I find one infested with them(goggle eyes seem to really get overrun with em), I trash em

I have found them in crappie and goggle eyes in virtually every body of water I have caught them in, so they are not endemic to specific lakes, creeks or rivers. I once caught some big bullheads, I mean BIG bullheads in a stock tank on a farm up near Sherman, but those were brownish/beige colored, exact same parasite except for the color, and those fish had em, head to tail, in the flesh. They seemed to concentrate a bit more around what on regular fish would be the rib cage. They got trashed. Took no chances, and knew a lot less about them than I now know.

welcome to the forum!