Líffræðifélag Íslands - biologia.is
Líffræðiráðstefnan 2025
Erindi/veggspjald / Talk/poster V85
Höfundar / Authors: Valerie Chosson1*, Laure de Montety1, Sverrir D. Halldórsson1, Haseeb S. Randhawa 2,3,4.
Starfsvettvangur / Affiliations: 1 Marine and Freshwater Research Institute, Hafnarfjörður, Iceland 2 Faculty of Life and environmental Sciences, University of Iceland, Reykjavik, Iceland 3 South Atlantic Environmental Research Institute, Stanley, Falkland Islands 4 New Brunswick Museum, Saint John, NB, Canada
Kynnir / Presenter: Valerie Chosson
One of the consequences of the ongoing biodiversity crisis may be the extinction of half or more of the existing species on the planet, including many that have not yet been described. One of the most overlooked groups remains parasitic organisms. Indeed, parasite communities have often been neglected in many biodiversity studies due to the difficulties in obtaining samples, and the challenges associated with specie identification, including the lack of experts. Tracking parasite is even more challenging with elusive hosts such as marine mammals. Indeed, the larger the host, the rarer the opportunity to observe and describe endoparasite. On the 27th of November 2021, a male fin whale Balaenoptera physalus (Linnaeus) was reported stranded dead on the southern Icelandic shore. Here, we report the first evidence of the presence of the notocotylid trematode Ogmogaster antarctica Johnston, 1931, collected from the intestine of the stranded fin whale, on the edge of the Arctic Ocean. This discovery extends the known the distribution of O. antarctica from the Antarctic, where it was first described in 1931, to the sub- Arctic ocean in 2021 and highlights the need to further investigate the understudied parasite communities of the cetaceans in Icelandic waters as a source of information on parasite biodiversity.