Parasites of the Southern silvery grebe Podiceps occipitalis (Aves, Podicipedidae) in Chile

Abstract

A total of 97 southern silvery grebes (Podiceps occipitalis), which died as the result of an oil spill on the coast of central Chile, were examined for ecto- and endoparasites. Two lice species including Aquanirmus rollandii (Philopteridae) and Pseudomenopon dolium (Menoponidae) were found from 6.2% (6/97) of birds. In 91.7% (89/97) of cases, grebes were infected with some kind of helminths. Three species of gastrointestinal helminths were detected: Eucoleus contortus (Nematoda), Profilicollis bullocki (Acanthocephala), and Confluaria sp. (Cestoda). In addition, Pelecitus fulicaeatrae (Nematoda) was removed from the tibiotarsal-tarsometatarsal articulation in 13.4% (13/97) of the specimens examined. To our knowledge, these are the first records of A. rollandii, E. contortus, and Confluaria sp. as parasites of P. occipitalis. In addition, these findings expand the distributional range of A. rollandii, E. contortus, P. fulicaeatrae, and Confluaria sp. to Chile.

First report of cestode infection in the crustaceanArtemia persimilisfrom Southern Chilean Patagonia and its relation with the Neotropical aquatic birds

“…In South America, there are only two records of Confluaria spp. : C. capillaris (Rudolphi, 1810) in Tachybaptus dominicus (L.) in Brazil (Fuhrmann, 1906; Vasileva, Georgiev & Genov, 1999a) and an identified species of Confluaria reported from the Southern Silvery Grebe Podiceps occipitalis Garnot in the central Chile (González-Acuña et al, 2017). Until now, C. podicipina has been recorded in the Holarctic Region (Stock & Holmes, 1987; Vasileva, Georgiev & Genov, 2000).…”

“…Previous surveys on helminth parasites from aquatic birds in southern South America are scarce, with a few studies from the last decades including parasites of gulls ( Larus dominicanus and L. maculipennis ), cormorants ( Phalacrocorax olivaceus ), grebes ( Podiceps occipitalis, P. major and P. gallardoi ) and swans ( Cygnus melanocoryphus ) (see Torres et al, 1991; Torres et al, 1993; González-Acuña et al, 2009; González-Acuña et al, 2010; González-Acuña et al, 2017; Núñez et al, 2017b). The available data on the helminth fauna associated to Chilean Flamingo are very limited, consisting of two reports of nematodes from captive birds in the San Francisco Zoo (Fox et al, 1974) and two further nematodes from Central Argentina (Núñez et al, 2017a).…”

External and gastrointestinal parasites of the Franklin’s Gull, Leucophaeus pipixcan (Charadriiformes: Laridae), in Talcahuano, central Chile

“…This parasite has an indirect life cycle with decapod crustaceans as intermediate hosts; Emerita analoga (Stimpson, 1857) and Hemigrapsus crenulatus (Milne-Edwards, 1837) (Balboa et al, 2009;González-Acuña et al, 2009), both widely distributed along the coast of Chile (Retamal, 1981). Profilicollis altmani has been reported in Charadriiformes from the Neotropical region (Tantaleán et al, 2005;Riquelme et al, 2006;Gonzáles-Viera et al, 2009;González-Acuña et al, 2017;Rodríguez et al, 2017;Gomez-Puerta & Naupay, 2019), being previously isolated from Franklin's gulls in northern and central Chile and Peru (Tantaleán et al, 2005;Riquelme et al, 2006;Rodríguez et al, 2017), areas where it has also been recorded on its intermediate hosts and sympatric birds (Riquelme et al, 2006;Iannacone et al, 2007;Balboa et al, 2009). The present study provides a new report of this parasite-host association in central coasts of Chile, where L. pipixcan has been shown to be a better host that increases the abundance of P. altmani when it arrives to this area (Riquelme et al, 2006).…”

“…Eucoleus contortus (Creplin, 1839) (Enoplida: Capillariidae) was collected from the esophagus of three individuals, with 10% (3/30) prevalence ( Table 2). This nematode is frequently found in the esophagus of a wide variety of aquatic birds such as gulls, grebes, cormorants and ducks in Europe (Bosch et al, 2000;Sanmartín et al, 2005;Álvarez et al, 2006;Santoro et al, 2011), North America (Fedynich et al, 1997;Threlfall et al, 1982), Asia (Yoshino et al, 2009), and South America (Brazil and Chile) (Monteiro et al, 2011;González-Acuña et al, 2017;Carvalho et al, 2019). Eucoleus contortus was reported for the first time in Chile parasitizing Podiceps occipitalis (Podicipedidae) (González-Acuña et al, 2017); it is suspected that it could be an accidental infestation because of sharing the habitat with potential hosts.…”

Bird cestodes from Huinay (Comau Fjord), Chilean Patagonia: several species of the family Dilepididae (Platyhelminthes, Cyclophyllidea), with the erection of two new genera

“…However, apart from a few isolated reports limited to a small number of hosts (i.e. Babero et al 1981; Torres et al 1991; González-Acuña et al 2017), very little is known of the cestode fauna of birds in this country. In the frame of a global and coordinated effort to improve our knowledge of the diversity of the Cestoda (Platyhelminthes) (Caira and Jensen 2017), the authors spent two weeks collecting bird tapeworms in coastal Valdivian temperate rain forests around the Huinay Scientific Field Station (HSFS) (Chile) in November and December 2008.…”