Further Studies on Helminth Parasites of Fish in Asa Dam, Kwara State, Nigeria

Abstract

Studies on parasites in fish have been a great concern for over a decade now due to disease conditions, overall nutritive devaluation and huge economic  loss that resulted from parasitic infections. Added to the potential of infected fish to be a source of infections to man and other animals. The present  study is, however, designed to ascertain the parasitic infection in fish from Asa Dam, Kwara State, Nigeria. Atotal number of 196 fish belonging to 10  families and 18 species were examined for helminth infection with an overall prevalence rate of 31.10%. Parasites were recovered from the skin, gills,  body cavity, intestine, and liver of the fish host. Trematode was the most prevalent parasite group found in the fish host and represented 79.5% of the  isolated parasites, followed by Cestode (7.14%), and Acanthocephalan was the least group (0.4%) recovered. Most of the Trematodes were recovered from  T. zillii and H. fasciatus (109 and 56 respectively), while C. anguillaris, C. senegalensis, C. gariepinus and C. obscura have no cases of trematode.  2.55% of the cestodes were recovered from C. gariepinus while the overall index of infection was significantly high in T. zillii (48.90%) and H. fasciatus  (40.44%). The overall prevalence of parasites examined in relation to sex indicates that males had 33.7% females had 28.4% prevalence accordingly with  no significant difference (P> 0.05). This finding indicates that there is a high parasitic load as evident by the infection rate on the examined fishes, as such  adequate measures should be put in place to reduce and prevent the parasites from spreading.