0000000000282842
AUTHOR
Juan Carlos Casanova
A comparison of the structure of helminth communities in the woodmouse, Apodemus sylvaticus, on islands of the western Mediterranean and continental Europe
We investigated the pattern of helminth species diversity in woodmouse, Apodemus sylvaticus, on western Mediterranean islands. We first performed a survey of the helminth fauna of A. sylvaticus in Sicily. Despite the small sampling effort, parasite species richness in Sicily is large in comparison with parasite species richness on other Mediterranean islands. We tested the nestedness of helminth parasite species from a number of Mediterranean localities using data compiled from epidemiological surveys of the helminth species of A. sylvaticus. We showed a nested pattern for woodmouse helminth species on western Mediterranean islands which suggests that the distribution of parasites on these …
Finding of Parastrongylus cantonensis (Chen, 1935) in Rattus rattus in Tenerife, Canary Islands (Spain).
Parastrongylus cantonensis is a parasite of murid rodents that can infect humans and cause health problems as eosinophilic meningitis. Although it is endemic in south Asia, the Pacific islands, Australia, USA, and a few Caribbean islands, it has been extended to new geographical regions. In the Canary Islands (Spain) a survey of helminths of Rattus rattus, Rattus norvegicus and Mus musculus domesticus was carried out. Furthermore, five species of molluscs were examined for nematode larvae to determine whether they are potential intermediate hosts of P. cantonensis. Nematodes were found in the lungs of 15% of 67 R. rattus examined in Tenerife, one of the four studied islands, with a prevalen…