Anuprasanna Vankara^1*, Vijayalakshmi Chikkam²

¹Department of Animal Sciences, Yogi Vemana University, YSR Kadapa, A.P, 516 003, India; ²Department of Zoology, Andhra University, Visakhapatnam, 530 003, India.

*Correspondence | Anuprasanna Vankara, Yogi Vemana University, YSR Kadapa, India; Email: dr.anu@yogivemanauniversity.ac.in

Abstract
One hundred eighty two Channa punctatus collected from various freshwater bodies of Visakhapatnam District during 2007-2009 were examined for the presence of metazoan parasites of which 128 (70.3%) fish were parasitized by at least one or more metazoan parasite species. A total of 7 metazoan parasites were obtained during the present investigation of which 5 are endoparasites i.e. 3 Digeneans- Genarchopsis goppo Ozaki, 1925, Allocreadium handiai Pande, 1937, Metacercaria of Euclinostomum heterostomum (Rud, 1809) Travassos, 1928, 1 cestode- Senga viskhapatnamensis Rama Devi and Rao, 1974 and 1 acanthocephalan- Pallisentis ophiocephali (Thapar, 1930) Bayliss, 1933; while only 2 were ectoparasitic copepods- Lernaea bengalensis Gnanamuthu, 1951 and Lamproglena chinensis Yu, 1937. Endoparasites predominate the majority of the components of the infracommunities analysed and represented 90.5% of the total parasites collected. The Shannon weiner index (H’) and evenness (E) were applied to the fully sampled metazoan infracommunities. The digenean, Genarchopsis goppo was most prevalent in the parasite community of C. punctatus but occupies the position of satellite species. The acanthocephalan, Pallisentis ophiocephali is the second prevalent species and occupies the position of the secondary species. There are no core species in the community. An insignificant positive correlation (r=0.012) was observed between the standard length of host and parasitic abundance of all parasites in the sampled fishes. Only two species Pallisentis ophiocephali and Genarchopsis goppo showed over-dispersed distribution pattern while the rest of the other species showed random distribution pattern. Host sex has no influence on overall parasitic abundance (Z=-1.65, p=0.05). Jaccard’s index was employed to observe the interspecific assosciation between each pair of parasite species within a same host. The higher JI values indicate there is very less competition among species as occupy different niches within the same host.

Keywords | Parasite ecology, Community structure, Channa punctatus, Visakhapatnam

Editor | Muhammad Imran Rashid, Department of Parasitology, University of Veterinary and Animal Sciences, Lahore, Pakistan.

Received | June 22, 2015; Revised | August 18, 2015; Accepted | August 20, 2015; Published | October 02, 2015

Citation | Vankara A, Chikkam V (2015). Community structure analysis metazoan parasites of Channa punctatus (Bloch, 1800) from Meghadrigedda Reservoir of Visakhapatnam District, Andhra Pradesh, India. J. Adv. Parasitol. 2(3): 57-64.

ISSN | 2311-4096

Copyright © 2015 Vankara and Chikkam. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.