Makati City
July 21, 2014
Prof. Nemencio Caludio
Ph.D. Referee
PLOS Biology
Dear Dr. Caludio,
I am Anna Karenina Arandia, a graduate of BS Biology at University of Santo Tomas. Together with the research group, we humbly present to you our thesis about parasites in freshwaters. As one of the leaders, I am submitting our thesis entitled “Prevalence of some parasitic agents affecting the gills of some cultured fishes in Sharkia, Damietta and Fayium governorates” for you to be consider it as one of the articles to be published in you respective online journal.
To give you some overview, the abstract of the said thesis is written below:
“3010 apparently healthy and naturally infected fishes of different species (tilapia sp., catfish, carp sp., mullets and bayad were collected from December 2000 to December 2003 from different fish farms in Sharkia, Damietta and Fayuim. These fishes were subjected to full clinical, parasitological and histopathological examinations. The infested fishes suffered mainly from respiratory manifestations, blackness of the skin and mortalities. The parasitic infestations were found to be the major problem and the most prevalent disease causative agents among cultured fish spp. Their percentages were 54.5 % (918 infected fish out of 1686), 62.2 % (585 infected out of 941), 44.4 % (51 infected out of 115), 22.2 % (6 infected out of 27), 15.7 % (17 infected out of 108) and 10.5 % (14 infected out of 133) in adult tilapias, frys & fingerlings of tilapias, catfish, Bagrus bayad, mullets and carp sp. respectively. The isolated parasites were Trichodina, Monogenea, Henneguya sp., EMC of Centrocestus, Clinostomum and Prohemistomum sp. The prevalence of those parasites among different cultured fishes in Sharkia, Damietta and Fayium was studied. The histopathological alterations due to different parasitic agents were mainly hyperplasia and even complete sloughing of secondary gill lamellae, multiple EMC surrounded