heart worm

How Heartworms Infect Dogs: It’s Not Easy!

Step 1: To infect your dog, you need mosquitoes (so you need warm temperatures and standing water). More specifically, you need a hungry female mosquito of an appropriate species. Female mosquitoes act as airborne incubators for premature baby heartworms (called microfilariae). Without the proper mosquito, dogs can’t get heartworms. Period.

That means dogs can’t “catch” heartworms from other dogs or mammals or from dog park lawns. Puppies can’t “catch” heartworms from their mothers and moms can’t pass heartworm immunity to pups.

Step 2: Our hungry mosquito needs access to a dog already infected with sexually mature male and female heartworms that have produced babies.

Step 3: The heartworm babies must be at the L1 stage of development when the mosquito bites the dog and withdraws blood.

Step 4:  Ten to fourteen days later — if the temperature is right –the microfilariae mature inside the mosquito to the infective L3 stage then migrate to the mosquito’s mouth. (Yum!)

Step 5:  Madame mosquito transmits the L3’s to your dog’s skin with a bite. Then, if all conditions are right, the L3’s develop in the skin for three to four months (to the L5 stage) before making their way into your dog’s blood.  But your dog still isn’t doomed.

Step 6:   Only if the dog’s immune system doesn’t rid the dog of these worms do the heartworms develop to adulthood.

Step 7:   It takes approximately six months for the surviving larvae to achieve maturity. At this point, the adult heartworms may produce babies if there are both males and females, but the kiddies will die unless a mosquito carrying L3’s intervenes.  Otherwise, the adults will live several years then die.

Very informative  

It's an old post but still, Thanks for the info Very helpful