The latest news from African gyrodactylid world
| Authors | |
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| Year of publication | 2013 |
| Type | Conference abstract |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | The family Gyrodactylidae contains viviparous and oviparous representatives living worldwide, but African continent hosts only that viviparous ones. Since November 2004, several expeditions to Africa have been realized with particular target to explore parasite s diversity on freshwater fish. During nearly one decade an interesting and variable samples of gyrodactylid parasites have been found and collected from various hosts in six African countries (Senegal, Sudan, Mozambique, Kenya, Zimbabwe and South Africa). Several new representatives of genus Gyrodactylus Nordmann, 1832 and Macrogyrodactylus Malmberg, 1957 have been described and new genus description has been published so far. Undergoing studies indicate that species divesity of African Gyrodactylus is quite hight and number of viviparous genera living in Africa will officialy increase very soon. The fiding of new genera of Gyrodatylidae discovers morphological variability in parasite s body structure as male copulatory organs or in the manner how parasites use their opisthaptor to attach hosts. Recently, the sequencing of nuclear regions allowed us to study phylogeny of African gyrodactylid representatives and new data open the space for deeper phylogenetic insight of these parasites. |
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