Back to Search Start Over

Biogeography of larval trematodes in the freshwater snail, Semisulcospira libertina: a comparison of the morphological and molecular approaches.

Authors :
Miura O
Takisawa S
Source :
Parasitology international [Parasitol Int] 2024 Oct; Vol. 102, pp. 102924. Date of Electronic Publication: 2024 Jul 15.
Publication Year :
2024

Abstract

While biogeographic patterns of free-living organisms are well documented, the biogeography of parasitic fauna remains largely unclear. Due to morphological similarities, parasites are often difficult to identify without the aid of molecular genetics, further complicating the interpretation of their biogeographic patterns. We investigated trematode parasites infecting the East Asian freshwater snail Semisulcospira libertina to understand their biogeography and to evaluate how molecular approaches influence the interpretation of biogeographic patterns of the trematode fauna. We identified 46 genetically delimited species from 19 morphologically distinguishable trematodes infecting S. libertina and found that their species richness was negatively correlated to latitude. We also found that potential definitive host (fishes) richness and host body size were positively correlated with trematode species richness, suggesting that host attributes are essential factors shaping the biogeographic pattern in trematodes. These trends were observed irrespective of species identification methods, demonstrating that classical morphological identification can also effectively identify the latitudinal gradient pattern in trematodes. We further detected the distance decay of similarity in trematode communities, although this trend was only detectable in the biogeographic dataset based on molecular identification. Our study showed that morphological identification sufficiently reflects the latitudinal richness gradient while molecular identification is essential to estimate accurate local species richness and increase the resolution of the large-scale pattern of population similarities in the trematode communities.<br />Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.<br /> (Copyright © 2024. Published by Elsevier B.V.)

Details

Language :
English
ISSN :
1873-0329
Volume :
102
Database :
MEDLINE
Journal :
Parasitology international
Publication Type :
Academic Journal
Accession number :
39019105
Full Text :
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.parint.2024.102924