Scientific publications

Notocotylidae is a family of digeneans with some aberrant morphological features (absence of ventral sucker), which as sexual adults parasitise herbivorous and molluscivorous birds and mammals. The phylogenetics and taxonomy of this family have many unresolved problems concerning the relatedness of genera and species and the reliability of identification of specimens for which molecular data are available. The aim of this study is morphological and molecular characterisation of the type species of Notocotylus Diesing, 1839 (Notocotylus triserialis Diesing, 1839) and its two congeners, Notocotylus pacifera (Noble, 1933) and Notocotylus sp., and
verification of the monophyly of the genus Notocotylus within the taxonomic boundaries established in the recent revision. Notocotylus triserialis was collected from a Greater Whitefronted Goose Anser albifrons (Scopoli, 1769) taken down in the Russian Karelia, and the other two digenean species were derived from European Coots Fulica atra Linnaeus, 1758, from different locations in Eurasia (Eastern Europe and the Far East). We provide detailed morphological descriptions of the examined digeneans, supplemented with original line drawings. Notocotylus sp. is morphologically similar to N. pacifera but differs in cirrus sac length. Phylogenetic inference based on the 28S rRNA gene dataset places N. triserialis within a wellsupported clade comprising several congeners, whereas N. pacifera is recovered outside this assemblage, forming a closer phylogenetic association with Pseudocatatropis dvoryadkini Izrailskaia, Besprozvannykh, Tatonova, Nguyen and Ngo, 2019. Thus, our data do not support the monophyly of the genus Notocotylus.