{"id":39206,"date":"2020-12-07T13:32:25","date_gmt":"2020-12-07T13:32:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cupblog.bluefusesystems.com\/?p=39206"},"modified":"2020-12-07T13:32:27","modified_gmt":"2020-12-07T13:32:27","slug":"relationships-between-seabirds-and-haemadipsid-leeches-vehicles-for-long-distance-dispersal-of-the-blood-suckers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/2020\/12\/07\/relationships-between-seabirds-and-haemadipsid-leeches-vehicles-for-long-distance-dispersal-of-the-blood-suckers\/","title":{"rendered":"Relationships between seabirds and haemadipsid leeches: vehicles for long-distance dispersal of the blood-suckers"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The latest Paper of the Month for Parasitology<\/a> is Host\u2013parasite relationships between seabirds and the haemadipsid leech Chtonobdella palmyrae (Annelida: Clitellata) inhabiting oceanic islands in the Pacific Ocean<\/a><\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The Indo-Pacific region harbours blood-sucking terrestrial leeches that belong to the family Haemadipsidae. A tiger leech Haemadipsa picta<\/em> indigenous to Southeast Asia is one of the representatives of these blood suckers. Members of Haemadipsa<\/em> possess three jaws in the oral cavity. According to the present classification of haemadipsids, the family contains an additional two genera, the three-jawed Tritetrabdella<\/em> and the two-jawed Chtonobdella<\/em>. While the distribution of Haemadipsa<\/em> and Tritetrabdella<\/em> is restricted to the Oriental and Sino-Japanese regions, the two-jawed Chtonobdella<\/em> is widely indigenous to the Indo-Pacific area including continental as well as oceanic islands, for examples, Chtonobdella<\/em> skottsbergi<\/em> is from the Juan Fernandez Island in the southeastern Pacific. Passive long-distance dispersal of Chtonobdella<\/em> leeches via migratory birds has been thus suggested. However, preceding studies did not record such avian species as a host of Chtonobdella<\/em> leeches. Although recent analyses on invertebrate-derived DNA have shed light on the hidden host-parasite relationships between vertebrates and haemadipsids and successfully revealed further avian-hosts of the leeches, the birds detected by those studies were sedentary or flightless. It had remained veiled how Chtonobdella<\/em> leeches have dispersed overseas and maintained their wide range in the Indo-Pacific region.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Chtonobdella palmyrae<\/em> infesting the eyes of a Tristram\u2019s storm petrel. Photo by Hajime Suzuki and Naoko Suzuki.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

As a hirudinologist, I was very fortunate to unveil the host-parasite relationships between migratory seabirds belonging to Procellariiformes (petrels) and Chtonobdella<\/em> leeches with my colleagues, who specialize either in ornithology, or in natural history of organisms endemic to the Bonin Islands in the northwestern Pacific. In total, we examined<\/a> 25 haemadipsid leeches obtained from eyes and\/or the mucous membrane of two petrel species, Pterodroma hypoleuca<\/em> and Oceanodroma tristrami<\/em>, captured at six locations around Japan, and realized that all leeches unquestionably belong to the two-jawed Chtonobdella<\/em>, which had never been recorded from the Japanese Archipelago or adjacent islands. Moreover, our DNA analyses revealed that the Japanese Chtonobdella<\/em> leeches are conspecific with Chtonobdella palmyrae<\/em>, which are known to be from the Palmyra Atoll in the central Pacific. Procellariiform seabirds had been deemed to be potential hosts of Chtonobdella<\/em> leeches; our study<\/a> finally documents certain host-parasite relationships between procellariiform birds and Chtonobdella<\/em> leeches, and provides insights into how Chtonobdella<\/em> leeches have achieved their widespread distribution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We are convinced that C. palmyrae<\/em> almost surely can disperse about 1,000 km by infesting the eyes and mucous membranes of procellariiform seabirds. Our results<\/a> also suggest that at least one population of C. palmyrae<\/em> is maintained somewhere in the Japanese Archipelago, probably in the Bonin Islands and Volcano Islands, but the precise habitat of C. palmyrae<\/em> in the Japanese Archipelago still remains uncertain. It is also unclear how the trans-oceanic distribution of C. palmyrae<\/em> was established, because the Japanese Archipelago is more than 6,000 km from Palmyra Atoll and moreover, both petrel-host species of C. palmyrae<\/em> have never been recorded in the Palmyra Atoll. Our findings<\/a> are just the first step toward us understanding how the present distributions of blood-sucking Chtonobdella<\/em> leeches have formed. Further surveys will lead us to elucidate the detailed evolutionary history of C. palmyrae<\/em> and congeners.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The paper Host\u2013parasite relationships between seabirds and the haemadipsid leech Chtonobdella palmyrae (Annelida: Clitellata) inhabiting oceanic islands in the Pacific Ocean<\/a><\/em>, by Takafumi Nakano, Hajime Suzuki, Naoko Suzuki, Yuichi Kimura, Tatsuo Sato, Hiromi Kamigaichi, Naoki Tomita and Takeshi Yamasaki,  published in Parasitology, <\/em><\/a> is available free for a month.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Photo courtesy of Takafumi Nakano<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The latest Paper of the Month for Parasitology is Host\u2013parasite relationships between seabirds and the haemadipsid leech Chtonobdella palmyrae (Annelida: Clitellata) inhabiting oceanic islands in the Pacific Ocean The Indo-Pacific region harbours blood-sucking terrestrial leeches that belong to the family Haemadipsidae. A tiger leech Haemadipsa picta indigenous to Southeast Asia is one of the representatives […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":685,"featured_media":39211,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,1,9],"tags":[8240,8241,8243,8242,3555,342,6895,3800],"coauthors":[8239],"class_list":["post-39206","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-life-sciences","category-news","category-science-technology","tag-chtonobdella","tag-haemadipsid","tag-hirudinology","tag-leech","tag-par","tag-parasitology","tag-parasitology-paper-of-the-month","tag-potm"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39206","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/685"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39206"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39206\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":39228,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39206\/revisions\/39228"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/39211"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39206"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39206"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39206"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=39206"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}