Eimeria ferreirai Oliveira and Berto, 2020

Oliveira, Mariana S., Genovez-Oliveira, Jhon Lennon, Ortúzar-Ferreira, Carlos Nei, Maronezi, Carla, Thode-Filho, Sergio, Cardozo, Sergian V., Oliveira, Águida A., Lima, Viviane M. & Berto, Bruno P., 2020, Eimeria ferreirai n. sp. (Chromista: Miozoa: Eimeriidae) from doves Leptotila spp (Columbiformes: Columbidae) from Brazil, Zootaxa 4821 (1), pp. 148-160 : 150-152

Eimeria ferreirai Oliveira and Berto n. sp.

Type host: White-tipped dove Leptotila verreauxi Bonaparte, 1855 ( Aves: Columbiformes : Columbidae ).

Other host: Grey-fronted doves Leptotila rufaxilla (Richard & Bernard, 1792) ( Aves: Columbiformes : Columbidae ).

Type locality: Itatiaia National Park (22°27’40”S, 44°35’31”W), Southeastern Brazil .

Other localities: Serra dos Órgãos National Park (22°31’10”S, 43°00’36”W) and Pinheiral (22°31’37’’S, 43°59’45’’W), also from Southeastern Brazil.

Type-material: Photosyntypes, line drawing and oocysts recovered from L. verreauxi in 2.5% K 2 Cr 2 O 7 solution ( Williams et al. 2010) are deposited at the Museu de Zoologia at the Universidade Federal Rural do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, under accession number MZURPTZ2019016. Photomicrographs are also deposited and available (http://r1.ufrrj.br/labicoc/colecao.html) in the Parasitology Collection of the Laboratório de Biologia de Coccídios, at UFRRJ, under repository number P-99/2019. Photographs of the type-host specimen (symbiotype) are deposited in the same collection .

Representative DNA sequence: One representative COI sequence was deposited in the GenBank database under the accession number MN 326301 .

ZooBank registration: To comply with the regulations set out in article 8.5 of the amended 2012 version of the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature ( ICZN, 2012), details of the new species have been submitted to ZooBank. The Life Science Identifier ( LSID) for E. ferreirai is urn:lsid:zoobank.org:act:04C29620-AF5E-4C8DBF5D-5B9D31572122 .

Site of infection: Unknown.

Prevalence: 70% (7/10) overall; 78% (7/9) for L. verreauxi ; and 100% (1/1) for L. rufaxilla .

Sporulation: Exogenous. All oocysts were passed in the feces unsporulated and were fully sporulated by day 7 in K 2 Cr 2 O 7 solution at room temperature (20–25°C).

Etymology: The specific name is derived from the family name of a Brazilian ornithologist Dr Ildemar Ferreira, given in his honor for his contribution to the study of ecology and parasitology of birds.

Description ( Figs 1 ; 2 A–F)

Oocyst (n = 22) sub-spherical to ellipsoidal, 19−25 × 16−21 (21.4 × 18.8); length/width (L/W) ratio 1.0−1.4 (1.15). Wall bi-layered, delicate, 1.3−1.9 (1.6) thick, outer layer smooth, c. 2/3 of total thickness. Micropyle present, but barely discernible in some oocysts, 3.0−4.0 (3.5) wide. A delicate micropyle cap was observed in few oocysts. Oocyst residuum absent, but 1 or 2 rounded polar granules are present. Sporocyst elongate ovoidal to boomerangshaped, 12−15 × 6−8 (13.4 × 6.9); L/W ratio 1.8−2.2 (1.95). Stieda body present, triangular to lozengal, 1.0 high × 1.5 wide. Sub-Stieda and Para-Stieda bodies absent. Sporocyst residuum present, consisting of granules of different sizes. Sporozoites vermiform, with a posterior refractile body and a central nucleus.

Remarks: Eimeria ferreirai is different from other coccidian species of Columbidae on in a few aspects ( Table 1). In fact, there are few characteristic features, often barely detailed, that differentiate some Eimeria spp. from Columbiformes ( Ortuzar-Ferreira et al. 2020) , such as Eimeria labbeana (Labbe, 1896) Pinto, 1928 , Eimeria columbarum Nieschulz, 1935 , Eimeria columbae Mitra and Das Gupta, 1937 , Eimeria curvata Adriano, Thyssen and Cordeiro, 2000 , Eimeria janovyi Bandyopadhyay, Bhakta and Shukla, 2006 , Eimeria columbapalumbi Jamriška and Modrý, 2012 and Eimeria sp. of Yang et al. (2016), which are very similar morphologically and morphometrically, and have ecological compatibility. The presence of micropyle and micropyle cap differentiates E. ferreirai from all other Eimeria spp.; however, failure to observe this characteristic feature approximates Eimeria sp. of Yang et al. (2016) of E. ferreirai . In this sense, sequencing of the COI gene was performed to complement the identification of E. ferreirai and differentiate it from Eimeria sp. of Yang et al. (2016), which was also molecularly identified by the COI gene.

Phylogenetic analysis: DNA amplification of the oocysts of E. ferreirai recovered from a L. verreauxi from Itatiaia National Park showed a clear band of ~250 bp. Phylogenetic analysis included 20 sequences for Eimeriidae species available on GenBank ( Fig. 3 ). Toxoplasma gondii (Nicolle and Manceaux, 1908) was used as the outgroup. Eimeria ferreirai had the maximum similarity of only 94.9% with Eimeria purpureicephali Yang, Brice and Ryan (2016) ( KU140598 ), which is a coccidian parasite of red-capped parrots Purpureicephalus spurius (Kuhl, 1820) (Yang et al. 2016) . Thus, E. ferreirai sat isolated in the cladogram, between clades with Eimeria spp. from Psittaciformes and Galliformes, in addition to an Eimeria sp. from house mice Mus musculus Linnaeus, 1758 ( MH777502 ), which must be a pseudoparasite ( Trefancová et al. 2019). Similarity to other Eimeria spp. from Columbiformes was low, of 93.5% with Eimeria sp. of Yang et al. (2016) ( KT305929 ), of 90.9% with Eimeria columbinae OrtúzarFerreira and Berto, 2019 ( MN082528 ) (Ortúzar-Ferreira et al. 2019) and 93.5% with an Eimeria sp. from pigeons ( MF496271 ) which is deposited in GenBank, but yet unpublished.

Figures

FIGURE 1. Line drawing of the sporulated oocyst of Eimeria ferreirai n. sp., a new coccidium species recovered from doves Leptotila spp. Scale-bar: 10µm.

FIGURE 2. Photomicrographs (A–F) of sporulated oocysts of Eimeria ferreirai n. sp., a new coccidium species recovered from doves Leptotila spp. Note the inner (IL) and outer (OL) layer of the oocyst wall, micropyle (M), micropyle cap (MC), nucleus (N), polar granule (PG), refractile body (RB), Stieda body (SB) and the sporocyst residuum (SR). Scale-bar: 10µm.

FIGURE 3. Maximum likelihood tree estimated from the COI gene sequences of eimeriid species. Numbers at nodes represent bootstrap support 1000 replicates (> 50%) for Neighbor-Joining (NJ) and Maximum Likelihood (ML) respectively. Scale bar represents the number of nucleotide substitutions per site.