Family: Heligmonellidae

Revised 10/19/24

Classification:
 

   Chromadorea

Chromadoria

Rhabditida

Rhabditina

Heligmosomoidea

           Heligmonellidae (Skrjabin & Schikhobalova, 1952) Durette-Desset & Chabaud, 1977

Primarily parasites of rodents, rabbits and insectivores.

Four Subfamilies:

• Brevistriatinae - parasites of rabbits, rodents and mouse-deer
• Helligmonellinae - parasites of insectivores, rabbits and rodents
• Nippostrongylinae - parasites of rabbits, rodents, Hyrax, insectivores
• Pudicinae - parasites of rodents.

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Morphology and Anatomy:

• Buccal capsule reduced to annulus; lips absent; cephalic vesicle present;
• Ssynlophe with longitudinal cuticular ridges continuous or discontinuous; careen present or absent; oblique axis or axes of orientation; not bilaterally symmetrical;
• bursa of various types, mainly 2–2-1, less commonly 1–3-1 or 1–4, never 2–1-2;
• female monodelphic; tail without spine.

Distribution

Heligmonellids are major components of the helminth parasites of murid rodents (Rodentia: Muridae). In general, nematodes of this family are small and coiled.  Often a rodwent is infected by more than one species.The development of new technology will be necessary to clearly assess species composition of heligmonellids in a host. Metagenomic analysishas been applied to determine the real diversity and species richness of the helminth community of murids (Tanaka et al., 2014; ). Clearly, a metagenomic analysis should be supported by accurate identification based on morphological taxonomy (Hasegawa et al., 2017).

Economic Importance:

Hosts:

 Rodents, rabbits and insectivores.

Feeding

Life Cycle:

Damage:

Management:

References:

Beveridge, I., Spratt, D.M.  and Durette-Desset, M-C. 2014. Order Strongylida (Railliet and Henry, 1913). In Schmidt-Raesa, A. (ed). Handbook of Zoology: Gastroctricha, Cycloneurelia and Gnathifera. Vol 2. Nematoda. De Gruyter, Berlin

Durette-Desset, M-C., Hugot, J.P., Darlu, P. and Chabaud, A.G. 1999. A cladistic analysis of the Trichostrongyloidea. Int. Jour. Parasitol. 21:579-587.

Hasegawa, H., Dewi, K., Fitriana, Y., Asakawa, M. 2017.  Nippostrongylus smalesae sp. nov. (Nematoda: Heligmonellidae) collected from Maxomys whiteheadi (Rodentia: Muridae) of Sumatra, Indonesia.  Zootaxa 4323:579-585.

Tanaka, R., Hino, A., Tsai, I.J., Palomares-Rius, J.E., Yoshida, A., Ogura, Y., Hayashi, T., Maruyama, H. & Kikuchi, T. 2014. Assessment of helminth biodiversity in wild rats using 18S rDNA based metagenomics. PLoS ONE, 9, e110769. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0110769.

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