Apororhynchus
Apororhynchus is a genus of small parasitic spiny-headed worms. The worms exclusively parasitize birds by attaching themselves around the cloaca using their hook-covered proboscis. Infestation by an Apororchus species may cause enteritis and anemia. There are six species that are distributed globally.
About Apororhynchus in brief
Apororhynchus is a genus of small parasitic spiny-headed worms. The worms exclusively parasitize birds by attaching themselves around the cloaca using their hook-covered proboscis. The bird hosts are of different orders, including owls, waders, and passerines. Infestation by an Apororchus species may cause enteritis and anemia. There are six species that are distributed globally, being collected sporadically in Hawaii, Europe, North America, South America, and Asia. A seventh species has been found in Santos, Brazil, a New World oriole oriole, parasitizing the digestive tube of a crested oropendola. It is the second parasite to be discovered in its genus, and the second species to be used to describe its genus and the species it parasitizes, the first being the aculeus aculeatus, which was discovered in the Berlin Museum in 1931. The name ArhynChus was chosen based on the characteristic absence of a probosc is in this species of Acanthocephala.
It was later renamed Apor orhyn chus by Shipley in 1899 due to the name Ar hynchUS having been used by Dujean in 1834 for a beetle. The distinguishing features of this order among acanthocephalans are a highly enlarged Proboscis with limited motility and a reduced size of the hooks. Additional anatomical features include a cerebral ganglion located under the anterior wall of the proboscopeis, long and tubular lemnisci that run along a central canal, the lack of any protonephrida, and the presence of eight pear-shaped cement glands used to temporarily close the posterior end of the female after copulation. A lack of features commonly found in the phylum Acanthiophala suggests an evolutionary branching from the other three orders of class Archiacanthoephala; however no genetic analysis has been completed to determine the evolutionary relationship between species.
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This page is based on the article Apororhynchus published in Wikipedia (as of Oct. 31, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
