Parasites of Fish from the Great Lakes - Great Lakes Fishery ...

The Jaccard coefficients determined for five major fish families in Lake Michigan were low and
there were no apparent relationships between the coefficients and the temperature preferences of
fish species representing the five fish families. These low coefficients and lack of relationship
with temperature preferences indicate that many parasite species have phylogenetic host
specificity, fish species in different families do not occupy the same habitats or their habitats do
not overlap much, and the diets of the fish species do not typically overlap either by food items or
spatially in foraging areas. The low Jaccard coefficients for parasite-community similarity
indicate that the centrarchids, catostomids, cyprinids, percids, and salmonids in Lake Michigan
share few parasite species, and that each fish family has its own characteristic parasite fauna.
Fish Families—Parasite Communities
The most-common parasite species in centrarchids and percids were the digenetic trematode
species. However, most of these digenetic trematode species were specific to one fish family. The
percentage composition of digenetic trematodes in relation to other parasite groups in
centrarchids and percids indicates these fish spend time in shallow water since almost all the
known digenetic trematodes use molluscs as first intermediate hosts. Most of the parasites
reported from cyprinids were protozoans. The studies of Cone et al. (2004) and Cone and
Marcogliese (2010), reporting only on the myxozoan protozoans of Notropis hudsonius, separated
out the cyprinids from the other fish families with this protozoan group. Most of the parasites
from catostomids were acanthocephalans, and most from the salmonids were copepods, cestodes,
and nematodes. The larval stages (procercoids) of most, if not all, of these cestode species in
salmonids use free-living copepods as first intermediate hosts. The parasitic copepods have direct
life cycles.
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