TY  - JOUR
A1  - Hohenadler, Michael Andreas Alfred
A1  - Honka, Katrin Isabel
A1  - Emde, Sebastian
A1  - Klimpel, Sven
A1  - Sures, Bernd
T1  - First evidence for a possible invasional meltdown among invasive fish parasites
T2  - Scientific reports
N2  - Biological invasions are frequently studied topics in ecological research. Unfortunately, within invasion ecology parasite-associated aspects such as parasite impacts on new environments and on local host populations are less well-studied. Round gobies migrating from the Ponto-Caspian region into the Rhine River system are heavily infested with the Ponto-Caspian acanthocephalan parasite Pomphorhynchus laevis. As shown by experimental infestations the acanthocephalans occur as pre-adults in host-encapsulated cysts within the internal organs of the migrating gobies, but remain infective for their definitive host chub. Recently, we described the occurrence of larvae of another parasite, the invasive eel swim bladder nematode Anguillicola crassus, in these Pomphorhynchus cysts. In the present study, we could prove the infectivity of the nematode larvae for European eels for the first time. After experimental inoculation of Pomphorhynchus cysts occasionally infested with A. crassus larvae, the nematodes grow to maturity and reproduce whereas all P. laevis were unviable. We therefore postulate that the nematode larvae behave like immunological hitchhikers that follow a “Trojan horse strategy” in order to avoid the paratenic host’s immune response. Accordingly, the interaction between both invasive parasites gives first evidence that the invasional meltdown hypothesis may also apply to parasites.
KW  - Freshwater ecology
KW  - Invasive species
Y1  - 2018
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/47696
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-476966
SN  - 2045-2322
N1  - Rights and permissions: Open Access: This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
VL  - 8
IS  - 1, Art. 15085
SP  - 1
EP  - 5
PB  - Macmillan Publishers Limited, part of Springer Nature
CY  - [London]
ER  -