Data from: Fluid preservation causes minimal reduction of parasite detectability in fish specimens: a new approach for reconstructing parasite communities of the past? ...

• Main Authors: Fiorenza, Evan, Leslie, Katie, Torchin, Mark, Maslenikov, Katherine, Tornabene, Luke, Wood, Chelsea
• Format: Dataset
• Language: English
• Published: Dryad 2020
• Subjects: historical ecology; marine fish parasites; natural history; parasite abundance; Museum collections; Bering Sea; Gulf of Alaska; Alaska
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.5061/dryad.v9s4mw6s6; https://datadryad.org/stash/dataset/doi:10.5061/dryad.v9s4mw6s6

Long-term datasets are needed to evaluate temporal patterns in wildlife disease burdens, but historical data on parasite abundance are extremely rare. For more than a century, natural history collections have been accumulating fluid-preserved specimens, which should contain the parasites infecting the host at the time of its preservation. However, before this unique data source can be exploited, we must identify the artefacts that are introduced by the preservation process. Here, we experimentally address whether the preservation process alters the degree to which metazoan parasites are detectable in fluid-preserved fish specimens when using visual parasite detection techniques. We randomly assigned fish of three species (Gadus chalcogrammus, Thaleichthys pacificus, Parophrys vetulus) to two treatments. In the first treatment, fish were preserved according to the standard procedures used in ichthyological collections. Immediately after the fluid-preservation process was complete, we performed parasitological ... : Study species We used three species of marine fish for our experiment. Two species, Walleye Pollock Gadus chalcogrammus and Eulachon Thaleichthys pacificus, were provided to us by the University of Washington Burke Museum Ichthyology Collection (UWFC). Both fish species were collected by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration research cruises in Alaska, frozen, and shipped to UWFC, where they were stored frozen as they awaited cataloging. The Walleye Pollock were collected from the Bering Sea and Gulf of Alaska between 2000 and 2002 and the Eulachon were collected from Shelikof Strait in the Gulf of Alaska in March of 2002. On 11 and 12 May 2018, we collected English sole Parophrys vetulus by otter trawl in Port Madison, WA, in conjunction with the Fisheries Ecology course offered by the School of Aquatic and Fisheries Sciences at the University of Washington. English sole were euthanized, placed on ice, and frozen within 6 hours of collection. These three species of fish represent a variety of ...