Morphological abnormalities in fish parasites: a potential tool for biomonitoring natural contaminants?
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FISH PARASITOLOGY - ORIGINAL PAPER
Morphological abnormalities in fish parasites: a potential tool for biomonitoring natural contaminants? Tímea Brázová 1 & Martina Orosová 1
&
Peter Šalamún 1 & Vladimíra Hanzelová 1
Received: 18 May 2020 / Accepted: 18 August 2020 # Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract A comparative study on the strobilar morphology of the tapeworm Proteocephalus percae (Müller, 1780) (Cestoda), a parasite of the perch Perca fluviatilis (L.), showed a high percentage of abnormally developed parasite individuals. The evaluation of biological samples showed seven types of morphological abnormalities, mostly related to reproductive organs of the model tapeworm species. The most commonly identified deformity was an incomplete segmentation of the strobila. A malformed ovary, which is a structural anomaly linked with proglottization and maturation of the strobila, was also shown to be rather frequent. Offish hosts (P. percae) were collected from two localities with different levels of heavy metal pollution, the highly contaminated water reservoir Ružín and a control locality, the water reservoir Palcmanská Maša, which belongs to the European network of protected areas in Slovakia. Tapeworm abnormalities occurred more frequently in individuals from the contaminated environment (29.9%) compared with individuals from the control site (4.9%). The concentrations of heavy metals found in the parasites and their fish hosts from the heavily polluted reservoir support our assumption that the occurrence of abnormalities could be linked with the destructive effect of toxic substances. The present study also demonstrates that the enumeration of body deformities exceeding the common level of phenotypic variability of particular parasitic species could potentially be used as an indicator of environmental problems. Keywords Proteocephalus . Cestoda . Morphological anomalies . Heavy metal pollution . Slovakia
Introduction In recent years, heavy metal pollution in nature has increased globally in magnitude and is still continuing. Although metals are ubiquitous in the natural environment, geologic and anthropogenic activities, such as uncontrolled urbanization and unregulated industrialization, are increasing metal concentrations to amounts that are harmful to living organisms (Järup 2003). Heavy metals tend to accumulate in the food chain, and some of them have toxic effects on organisms even at very low concentrations. In an organism, they can disrupt the metabolic functions of vital organs and glands or displace vital nutritional minerals from their original place and thus hinder Section Editor: Stephen A. Bullard * Martina Orosová [email protected] 1
Institute of Parasitology, Slovak Academy of Sciences, Hlinkova 3, 04001 Košice, Slovakia
their primary biological function (Singh and Kalamdhad 2011). Through metabolic interference and mutagenesis, heavy metals affect reproduction, induce cell damage and in extreme cases can even cause the death of the organism (Rice et al. 2014). O
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