2026/07/29 by Canan Hamurkaroğlu, Ahmet Özer, Nazan Danacıoğlu +1
paper · doi:10.1111/zsc.70080
ABSTRACT This systematic review documented a taxonomically diverse parasite fauna of freshwater fishes across seven geographical regions of Türkiye, encompassing 11 phyla: Acanthocephala, Annelida, Arthropoda, Choanozoa, Ciliophora, Cnidaria, Euglenozoa, Mollusca, Myzozoa, Nematoda, and Platyhelminthes. UpSet charts were created to display and analyze intersections among multiple groups of freshwater localities, higher‐level parasite and host fish taxa, and families. To visualize documented host–parasite relationships in the wild freshwater dataset, a bipartite network was constructed with freshwater fish and parasite families as nodes. Shannon diversity values calculated from documented parasite species assemblages were used in k‐means clustering to identify host groups with different parasite diversity profiles. The most species‐rich taxon was Platyhelminthes, accounting for 60.14% of all recorded parasite species, followed by Nematoda, the second‐largest group, accounting for 10.14%; the other taxa contributed smaller proportions. At the class level, Monogenea accounted for the largest proportion, representing 34.06% of all identified parasite species in the overall diversity, followed by Trematoda (14.49%) and Cestoda (11.59%), all of which accounted for significant portions of the dataset. The Marmara region was the most species‐rich freshwater environment in terms of both host fish and parasite diversity at the family level. Generalists, such as trematodes (Diplostomidae), cestodes (Bothriocephalidae), and copepods (Lernaidae), and specialists, such as monogeneans (Dactylogyridae and Ancylodiscoidae), were illustrated using heatmaps and networks to reveal their host ranges across seven freshwater environments.