Parasitology, Harold W. Manter Laboratory of
Date of this Version
5-1991
Abstract
Coevolution was studied in six species of rodents of the genus Ctenomys and their parasitic nematodes of the genus Paraspidodera, collected in Bolivia. Representatives of the families Octodontidae and Caviidae were used as outgroups for the mammals, and nematodes from caviids were used as outgroups of the nematodes from ctenomyids. For the nematodes, quantitative and qualitative morphological characteristics of both males and females and electrophoretic characters of both sexes were used to generate phylogenetic hypotheses of evolutionary relationships of the OTUs occurring in hosts of different species. Concordance estimates of cladograms generated from biochemical-genetic and morphological data of the nematodes show a percentage incongruence (Mickevich-Farris Incongruence Statistic or MF) of 8.23% in the character sets. Parsimony mapping, testing concordance of topologies between the trees derived from both analysis of both morphological and biochemical-genetic data indicates an overall agreement of 82.3% . Comparisons of topologies of the host and parasite cladograms, as measured with parsimony mapping, showed 70.8% concordance, indicating substantially more cospeciation than host-switching in the Ctenomys-Paraspidodera host-parasite system. Nematodes of the genus Paraspidodera appear to have invaded the Ctenomys lineage from an origin in caviids sometime before the ctenomyids began to diversify in early Pleistocene time.
Comments
Published in Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society (1991), 102: 169-201. Copyright 1991, the Linnean Society. Used by permission.