Researcher Discovers New Catfish Parasite Species In His Spare Time

Curiosity killed the cat(fish). A Japanese scientist has discovered a new species of fish parasite from invasive catfish he caught out of curiosity.

AsianScientist (Dec. 6, 2016) – Scientists from Hiroshima University have identified a new species of parasite infecting an invasive freshwater fish on the subtropical island of Okinawa, Japan. Results were published in Species Diversity.

The catfish species that hosts the parasites is native to the Amazon River and likely arrived in Japan in the 1980s by way of southeast Asian countries as part of the pet trade. The fish is sometimes eaten for food in Brazil, but is considered an ornamental fish in Japan.

In 2012, Mr. Masato Nitta, now a second-year PhD student at Hiroshima University, recognized some invasive fish in the stream that runs through the campus of the University of the Ryukyus in Okinawa, Japan, the university that hosted his research team during their field studies.

“It was just for play, not for official study. I saw two of the invasive catfish and I decided to try to catch them and check what parasites they had because I was curious. When I put the parasites under the microscope, they looked a little bit strange. No one had seen these parasites in Japan before,” said Nitta.

Nitta and his supervisor, Dr. Kazuya Nagasawa from the Graduate School of Biosphere Science at Hiroshima University, then studied the parasites of the invasive vermiculated sailfin catfish in more detail. Their latest research paper announces a species new to science, two species found in Japan for the first time, and confirms the presence of the species they identified in 2012. Only one species of monogenean is known to infect mammals, specifically the eyes of hippopotamus, so there is no record and little reason to suspect that the parasites pose any danger to humans directly.


The article can be found at: Nitta and Nagasawa (2016) Four Alien Monogeneans, Including Trinigyrus peregrinus n. sp., Parasite on the Invasive Armored Catfish Pterygoplichthys disjunctivus (Siluriformes: Loricariidae) from Okinawa-jima Island, Okinawa Prefecture, Japan.

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Source: Hiroshima University; Photo: Pixabay.
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