A long temporal study of parasitism in asexual-sexual populations of Carassius gibelio: Does the parasite infection support coevolutionary Red Queen dynamics?

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Authors

PAKOSTA Tomáš VETEŠNÍK Lukáš VETEŠNÍKOVÁ ŠIMKOVÁ Andrea

Year of publication 2018
Type Article in Periodical
Magazine / Source BioMed Research International
MU Faculty or unit

Faculty of Science

Citation
Web http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2018/6983740
Doi http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2018/6983740
Keywords Carassius gibelio; Red Queen hypothesis; gynogenesis; asexual; sexual
Description Carassius gibelio is an extraordinary cyprinid species exhibiting both sexual and asexual reproduction. We hypothesized that parasitism selection is one of the potential mechanisms contributing to the coexistence of the two reproductive forms of C. gibelio living in the same habitat. We performed a four-year study to investigate the dynamics of parasite infection in C. gibelio. According to the Red Queen prediction, the asexual form is a target of parasite adaptation due to its low genetic variability. Both sexual and gynogenetic forms of C. gibelio exhibited similar levels of prevalence, with monogeneans being the most frequently observed parasite group. We observed the temporal dynamics of parasite infection in the last year of investigation, when both forms were more strongly parasitized. The sexual form was more parasitized by ectoparasites in the first and last years and less parasitized by nematodes in the last year when compared to the gynogenetic form. We found no trend of high parasite infection in gynogenetic mtDNA haplotypes. We conclude that Red Queen dynamics is not the mechanism driving parasite infection in sexual-gynogenetic C. gibelio over a long time scale. Alternatively, we suggest that the dynamics of parasite infection in this complex may be generated by multiple mechanisms.
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