Aethycteron moorei (Monogenoidea: Dactylogyrida: Ancyrocephalidae) from the Fantail Darter, Etheostoma flabellare (Perciformes: Percidae): New distributional records for Arkansas and Oklahoma

Abstract

Little is known about monogenean parasites of fishes in Oklahoma (see McAllister et al. 2015). Members of the ancyrocephalid genus Aethycteron Suriano and Beverley-Burton, 1982, have been reported on the gills of various darters (Ammocrypta, Etheostoma, and Percina spp.) from Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, New York, North Dakota, Tennessee, and Ontario, Canada (see Hoffman 1999; Hanson and Stallsmith 2013; Cloutman and McAllister 2017). To our knowledge, nothing has been published on any species of Aethycteron in Oklahoma, and a single species, A. robisoni, was only recently described from Arkansas (Cloutman and McAllister 2017). Here, we report new distributional records for a species of Aethycteron from the Fantail Darter, Etheostoma flabellare Rafinesque, in Arkansas and Oklahoma. Etheostoma flabellare is a morphologically variable species of the subgenus Catonotus which some authors suggest is a complex of species (Blanton and Schuster 2008). Page and Burr (2011) consider E. flabellare to comprise three subspecies. Etheostoma flabellare is widely distributed in rocky riffles of small and medium streams in eastern North America from Atlantic, Great Lakes, and Mississippi River basins from southern Quebec to Minnesota, and south to the Pee Dee basin in northern South Carolina, northern Alabama, and northeastern Oklahoma (Page and Burr 2011).