Rosas-Valdez Rogelio, de León Gerardo Pérez-Ponce
Museo de Zoología "Alfonso L. Herrera", Departamento de Biología Evolutiva, Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Apartado Postal 70-399, 04510 México, D.F., México.
J Parasitol. 2011 Apr;97(2):361-3. doi: 10.1645/GE-2541.1. Epub 2010 Oct 20.
Host specificity plays an essential role in shaping the evolutionary history of host-parasite associations. In this study, an index of host specificity recently proposed was used to test, quantitatively, the hypothesis that some groups of parasites are characteristics of some host fish families along their distribution range. A database with all published records on the helminth parasites of freshwater siluriforms of Mexico was used. The host specificity index was used considering its advantage to measure the taxonomic heterogeneity of the host assemblages and its appropriateness for unequal sampling data. The helminth parasite fauna of freshwater siluriforms in Mexico seems to be specific for different host taxonomic categories. However, a relatively high number of species (47% of the total helminth fauna) is specific to their respective host family. This result provides further corroboration for the biogeographic hypothesis of the core helminth fauna proposed previously. The statistical values for host specificity obtained herein seem to be independent of host range. However, the accurate taxonomic identification of the parasites is fundamental for the evaluation of host specificity and the accurate evolutionary interpretation of this phenomenon.
宿主特异性在塑造宿主 - 寄生虫关联的进化历史中起着至关重要的作用。在本研究中，最近提出的宿主特异性指数被用于定量检验这样一个假设：某些寄生虫群体在其分布范围内是某些宿主鱼类科的特征。使用了一个包含墨西哥淡水鲇形目蠕虫寄生虫所有已发表记录的数据库。使用宿主特异性指数是考虑到其在测量宿主组合的分类异质性方面的优势以及其对不等抽样数据的适用性。墨西哥淡水鲇形目的蠕虫寄生虫区系似乎对不同的宿主分类类别具有特异性。然而，相对大量的物种（占蠕虫动物区系总数的47%）对其各自的宿主科具有特异性。这一结果为先前提出的核心蠕虫动物区系的生物地理假设提供了进一步的佐证。本文获得的宿主特异性统计值似乎与宿主范围无关。然而，寄生虫的准确分类鉴定对于评估宿主特异性以及对这一现象进行准确的进化解释至关重要。
