Marine Crustaceans as Potential Hosts and Vectors for Metazoan Parasites

Abstract

Crustaceans are highly abundant in the marine environment and play a key role as an important source of nutrition for a wide range of marine vertebrates such as fish, birds and mammals (seals, whales). In this context, marine helminth parasites have evolved complex (heteroxenous) life cycles in order to reproduce and use the trophic interactions in the marine food web to facilitate the transmission to the successive hosts. Members of the parasites taxa Digenea, Cestoda, Nematoda and Acanthocephala are common parasites in the marine environment and known to frequently include pelagic and benthic crustaceans of the subgroups Amphipoda, Cirripedia, Copepoda, Decapoda, Euphausiacea, Isopoda and Mysidacea in their life cycle. Infestation data from 52 peer-reviewed publications have been taken into consideration in order to summarize the current knowledge of crustaceans that are known to be the intermediate hosts for marine helminth parasites. This includes the discussion of life cycles, impacts of parasitism on hosts and zoonotical threats (e.g. for the nematode species of the genus Anisakis).