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The World of Protozoa, Rotifera, Nematoda and Oligochaeta

Ref ID : 2576

Mario F. Canella; [Ce qu'on ne connait pas sur un Holotriche Ectoparasite des Poissons Marins, Decouvert par le Dr. Sikama et Appele Cryptocaryon irritans par Miss Brown]. Annali Dell'Universita di Ferrara,Sezione III III(9):107-132, 1972

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The A. states a little history of the mutual ignorance (necessarily implying mistakes and misunderstandings) of authors who have studied a new Ciliate ectoparasite of marine fishes (Cryptocaryon irritans = Ichthyophthirius marinus). With opportune comparisons with Ichthyophthirius multifiliis, this paper summarises the descriptions - brief and insufficent as they are - of this interesting Ciliate given by Sikama, who discovered it in Japan in 1936; by Brown, who found it again in London in 1950, and by Nigrelli and Ruggieri (1966), who found it, since 1958, in the New York Aquarium. Miss Brown, who did not know Sikama's 1938 paper, hastily named Cryptocaryon irritans (names which moreover do not characterize it at all), and Corliss (1961) placed it, with reservations, among the Ophryoglenidae. Now there is the intention to retain this systematic placement (in the volume on the Ciliophora of the Traite de Zoologie) along with Ichthyophthirius, Ophryoglena, an imaginary Protophryoglena, and a questionable Ichthyophthirioides browni. In author's opinion, this would be a great mistake, since the available data on Cryptocaryon permit us only to consider it an incertae sedis Holotriche, whose oral apparatus (in so far as it is known), and other morphological and physiological characteristics do not permit of finding any affinity with Ichthyophthirius and so much less with Ophryoglena. In the Appendix, the A. relates, with some criticisms, the novelties coming from the Laboratoire de Zoologie et de Biologie compare de Protistes of the Clermont University, directed by Prof. De Puytorac, concerning the ultrastructures and systematics of the Peniculina (Hymenostomatida); these hymenostome Ciliates had recently been subdivided by Miss Roque in three families: Frontonoidea, Ophryoglenoidea, and Thuranielloidea. Of course, the << peniculus >> entity - to which Miss Roque had binded her name by her degree thesis (1961) - is reconfirmed (not as a buccal ciliary organelle, but as an infraciliary ultrastructure), but now one recognizes, between other things, that Ophryoglenidae have no peniculi, in opposition to the opinion maintained by Roque and De Puytorac since their first paper in collaboration on Ophryoglena bacterocaryon (1964, published on 1965). Therefore, also for the Clermont School, Ophryoglena and Ichthyophthirius are no more belonging to Peniculina. The A. recalls that Canella and Rocchi-Canella had proposed, on 1964, the creation of a new sub-order Ophryoglenina.