ORIGINS, DIVERSIFICATION, AND HISTORICAL STRUCTURE OF THE HELMINTH FAUNA INHABITING NEOTROPICAL FRESH-WATER STINGRAYS (POTAMOTRYGONIDAE)

Members of the freshwater stingray family Potamotrygonidae occur throughout the major river systems of eastern South America that empty into the Atlantic Ocean. Ichthyologists have tended to assume that the ancestor of the potamotrygonids was an Atlantic marine or euryhaline stingray that dispersed into freshwater, presumably during the last marine ingression 3-5 million years ago. The helminth parasites that inhabit potamotrygonids suggest an alternative perspective on their origin. Phylogenetic and biogeographic analysis of the helminths inhabiting potamotrygonids suggest that the hosts are derived from an ancestral Pacific urolophid stingray that was trapped in freshwater by the uplifting of the Andes beginning perhaps as early as the early Cretaceous period and ending by the mid-Miocene epoch, changing the course of the Amazon River, which previously had flowed into the Pacific Ocean.