Incidence of Ligula intestinalis from Transcaucasian barb

Abstract

The plerocercoid stage of Ligula intestinalis has been recorded from the body cavity of a wide range of fish species, particularly the Cyprinidae (Williams and Jones, 1994). In Turkish waters, published records have shown that commonly this parasites infects a range of Cyprinids; Leuciscus cephalus orientalis and Barbus plebejus lacerta (Cantoray and Ozcan, 1975); Barbus capito pectoralis (Ozdemir and Sarieyyuboglu, 1993); Acanthabrama marmid (Turk and Dofucu, 2000) and Vimba vimba (Ekmekci, 1989). Ligula intestinalis plerocercoids were recorded in non-cyprinid, the river leach, Barbatula barbatula L (Bean and Kirkwood, 1997), the Brown trout, Salmo trutta L. (Kennedy, 1974) in UK. and the minnow, Phoxinus phoxinus in Eastern Norway (Museth, 2001). In this study, Ligula intestinals was recorded first time from Transcaucasian barb (Capoeta capoeta bergamae) in Turkey. The genus Capoeta are herbivorous fish and widely distributed in Southern China, Northern India, Turkmenistan, Iran, Lake Aral, Middle East, and Anatolia. There are five species and six subspecies of this genus in the inland waters of Turkey (Talwar and Jhingran, 1992; Geldiay and Balik, 1996). The subspecies of C. capotea bergamae is distributed in Southwest of Turkey. It is a dominant subspecies in the water of Topcam Dam Lake which is consumed by local people.