Search results for "Delphinoidea"

Evolutionary relationships between digeneans of the family Brachycladiidae Odhner, 1905 and their marine mammal hosts: A cophylogenetic study.

2016

Cophylogenetic studies examine the congruence between host and parasite phylogenies. There are few studies that quantify the relative contribution of coevolutionary events, i.e. duplication, loss, failure-to-diverge, host-switching and spreading in trophically-transmitted parasites at the marine realm. We addressed this issue in the Brachycladiidae, a cosmopolitan digenean family specific to marine mammals. We used, for the first time, distance-based and event-based methods to explicitly test the coevolutionary events that have shaped the current brachycladiid-marine mammal associations. Parasite phylogeny was constructed using mtDNA ND3 sequences of nine brachycladiid species, and host phy…