LOS ANGELES — For five years, an elusive tormentor of animals hid from authorities in east Riverside County as 10 dogs were injured and another killed.

The victims hailed from Los Angeles, Riverside and Orange counties, while the suspect maintained a strong alibi: It had never visited California.

It took authorities years to discover the one key detail linking the abuser with those abused: time spent at the Colorado River at or near the California-Arizona border town of Blythe.

That's where professor Adler R. Dillman, chair of the University of California, Riverside's Department of Nematology (study of roundworms) and an expert on parasitology, and a team of researchers and students recently unmasked their culprit.

A parasite called Heterobilharzia americana, a flatworm commonly referred to as liver fluke, was behind the illness of the 11 dogs.

The parasite normally makes its home in Texas and in the South. Its discovery in California, in the Colorado River, marked its first recorded appearance in the area.

Dillman said he was part of a team that made four trips to the Colorado River between March and August of 2023 to collect more than 2,000 snails of two distinct species known to transmit the worms. They used DNA to identify both snails, Galba cubensis and Galba humilis, and the flatworm.

That squad included UC Riverside postdoctoral researcher Anil B. Baniya and graduate students Connor Goldy and Perla Achi. The trio, Dillman and others published their findings Wednesday in the scientific journal Pathogens.

"I was super excited to finally provide an answer as to what was happening with those dogs," Dillman said in a phone interview on Wednesday evening. "We suspected it was this parasite, but once we finally confirmed it, I was jumping up and down with excitement."

Dillman and various public health agencies dedicated to humans or animals have been trying to raise awareness of the parasite and its harm to dogs.

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