Metazoan parasite communities of wild Leporinus friderici (Characiformes: Anostomidae) from Amazon River system in Brazil

Diversity of metazoan parasites in Colossoma macropomum (Serrasalmidae) from the lower Jari River, a tributary of the Amazonas River in Brazil

“…The species richness varied between 1 and 9 (4.9 ± 1.9), the Brillouin index between 0 and 1.52 (0.80 ± 0.42), evenness (Takemoto et al 2009;Fischer et al 2003;Tavares-Dias et al 2017;Oliveira et al 2017). Colossoma macropomum from the lower Jari River were parasitized by four species of monogeneans, three nematodes, one acanthocephalan, one digenean, four crustaceans, one mite and one leech, but with dominance of monogeneas and overdispersion of parasites.…”

“…This omnivorous fish is exclusively frugivorous during the adult phase and, during the juvenile phase, tends to feed on zooplankton, mainly on cladocerans, copepods and chironomids (Soares et al 2011;Morais and O´Sullivan 2017). One important point that has been highlighted is the trophic level of the wild fish population in determining the abundance and species richness of parasites (Takemoto et al 2009;Poulin and Leung 2011;Oliveira et al 2017;Tavares-Dias et al 2017).…”

“…In fish, body size of hosts has emerged also as a significant predictor of the burden of parasites (Poulin 2004;Poulin and Leung 2011). In addition, factors such as the ecology of both freshwater fish and parasites, as well as environmental conditions, influence parasite fauna in populations of wild fish (Fischer et al 2003;Poulin and Leung 2011;Oliveira et al 2017;Tavares-Dias et al 2017). Considering the wide distribution of tambaqui in Amazon river systems, the parasitic fauna of natural populations of tambaqui has been little addressed.…”

“…Parasitism is one of the most common lifestyles on Earth, but parasites are rarely included in the studies (Chambouvet et al 2015;Oliveira et al 2017). The parasitic fauna of C. macropomum has been studied in floodplain lakes of the middle and lower Solimões River (Malta 1984;Morey and Malta 2016), and in the lower Amazonas River, in the state of Pará (Fischer et al 2003) These studies reported that wild C. macropomum populations harbor ectoparasite and endoparasite species of diverse taxa, which display a variety of strategies in their life cycles, which may be either direct or indirect.…”

Helminth parasites in two populations of Astronotus ocellatus (Cichliformes: Cichlidae) from the eastern Amazon, Northern Brazil

“…Parasites provide an interesting model for studying organization and structure of parasite communities in wild fish populations (FRANCOVÁ & ONDRAČKOVÁ, 2011;MARCOGLIESE et al, 2016;TAVARES-DIAS & NEVES, 2017;OLIVEIRA et al, 2017). For A. ocellatus from the Brazil, a total of 22 parasite species has been estimated; in addition some composition and structural patterns were detected in the parasite community, such as dominance of monogenean species, dominance of ectoparasite species with crustacean infracommunities more diverse than other ectoparasites, overdispersion of ectoparasites and endoparasites, interspecific associations in the ectoparasite infracommunities, specifically a combination of generalist and specialist parasites that may contribute to host population control and correlation between parasite abundance and host total body size at the infracommunity level (TAVARES-DIAS & NEVES, 2017).…”