Publications by authors named "Whitney C Preisser"

Long-term data allow ecologists to assess trajectories of population abundance. Without this context, it is impossible to know whether a taxon is thriving or declining to extinction. For parasites of wildlife, there are few long-term data-a gap that creates an impediment to managing parasite biodiversity and infectious threats in a changing world.

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Earth is rapidly losing free-living species. Is the same true for parasitic species? To reveal temporal trends in biodiversity, historical data are needed, but often such data do not exist for parasites. Here, parasite communities of the past were reconstructed by identifying parasites in fluid-preserved specimens held in natural history collections.

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Estimates of trematode diversity are inaccurate due to unrecognized cryptic species and phenotypic plasticity within species. Integrative taxonomy (genetics, morphology and host use) increases the clarity of species delineation and improves knowledge of parasite biology. In this study, we used this approach to resolve taxonomic issues and test hypotheses of cryptic species in a genus of trematode, Quinqueserialis.

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Gongylonema archboldi n. sp. (Nematoda: Gongylonematidae) is described from tunnels in the gastric mucosa of the stomach of the cotton rat (Sigmodon hispidus) from Highlands County, Florida, U.

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