IBSS Collection of Marine Parasites:
Collection of marine parasites maintained by the Institute of Biology of the Southern Seas

The aims of the project:

• to digitize the collection of marine parasites maintained by the Institute of Biology of the Southern Seas;
• to make on-line access to the collection available to anyone interested.

History

The collection of parasites from marine fishes and invertebrates, which is curated by the A. O. Kovalevsky Institute of Biology of the Southern Seas, Russian Academy of Science, was founded in the late 1950s by research workers of Sevastopol Biological Station (during the period 2015–2017, this institute was called the A. O. Kovalevsky Institute of Marine Biological Research). The greatest contributions to the establishment of this collection were made by V. M. Nikolaeva, A. M. Parukhin, T. N. Mordvinova and L. P. Tkachuk.

The collection continues to grow in size as type- and voucher-material of new and other taxa are added.

Geography

The collection contains specimens of parasites from:

Atlantic Ocean: the Azov, Black, Caspian, Mediterranean, Adriatic, Baltic and Caribbean Seas; the Eastern Central Atlantic; off Guinea, the Western Cape and other parts of South Africa, South Georgia, the Falkland Islands and Cuba; the Amazon delta and the Gulfs of Mexico and Guinea.

Indian Ocean: off Tanzania and Western Australia, off the Islands of Comoro, Amirante, Seychelles, Khuriya Muriya and Java, Cape Guardafui and the Kerguelen archipelago; the Bay of Bengal, the Great Australian Bight and the Gulfs of Masirah, Mannar and Aden; the Agulhas Bank; the Arabian and Red Seas.

Pacific Ocean: the Seas of Okhotsk and Japan, the South China Sea and the Gulf of Tonkin; off Hawaii and Chile.

Taxonomic diversity

The collection comprises more than 450 species belonging to the following taxa:
Helminths — Monogenea, Trematoda, Cestoda, Acanthocephala, Nematoda;
Protozoa — ‘Infusoria’, Gregarinasina;
Crustaceans — Copepoda, Isopoda;
Myxozoa.

Type-material in the collection is represented by 86 holotypes, more than 400 paratypes and about 100 syntypes.

Project team

Dmitrieva Eugenia V. — team leader, curator of Monogeneans
Lyakh Anton M. — web-developer and programer
Kornyychuk Yuliya M. — curator of Trematodes
Polyakova Tatyana A. — curator of Cestodes
Popyuk Maryana P. — curator of Acanthocephalans
Yurakhno Violetta M. — curator of Myxozoa
Pronkina Natalia V. — curator of Nematoda

Funding

In 2015–2017 the Russian Foundation for Basic Research supported the project for the creation of an on-line electronic catalogue of the collection and an associated taxonomic database via RFBR Grant No. 15-29-02684 ofi-m.

Copyright

All use of images and text on the IBSS Collection of Marine Parasites is subject to copyright laws. You may download and use images or text from the website unless such images or text have limitations indicated for their use.

Use of any images, text, or data accessed from the website should be credited as having been provided by the IBSS Collection of Marine Parasites website (see the ‘How to cite’ section) and acknowledge the project team.

How to cite