Morphological and Molecular Identification of Limnodrilus Claparede,1862 Species(clitellata: naiDIDAE) IN Tigris River, Baghdad/Iraq

  جمعت عينات ديدان الوحل من رواسب نهر دجلة للفترة من تشرين ثاني 2018 ولغاية تموز 2019 في منطقة الصرافية / بغداد- العراق. اعتمدت في تشخيص الانواع القياسات الأحيائية الخاصة بغلاف العضو الذكري والاهلاب، اضافة الى التحليل الجزيئي باستخدام  تضخيم الجين  المشفر 18s rRNA  ,واعتمادا على البرايمر العالمي ITS1  وITS4 . اوضحت نتائج القياسات المظهرية  تسجيل  الانواع Limnodrilus hoffmeisteri Claparède 1862 و L. claparedeianus Ratzel, 1868 و L. cervix Brinkhurst, 1963، بينما شخصت مجموعتين تمتلك غلاف عضو تناسلي قصير بالتقنية الجزيئية على انها  تابعة  للنوع Limnodrilus hoffmeisteri complex والنوع L. claparedeianus –cervix. وعد النوعان تسجيلأ" جديدا" للفونا العراقية وسجلا في المركز الوطني للمعلومات الاحيائية NCBI تحت رقم الانضمام LC497073 و LC497074 على التوالي.Sludge worm samples were collected from the Tigers River sediment during the period from November 2018 to June 2019 in Al Sarafiya District/ Baghdad- Iraq. Biometric morphological measurements focusing on the form of penis sheath and chaetal morphology were used for species identification, in addition to molecular analysis by amplification of conserved 18s rRNA encoding gene using ITS1 and ITS4 universal primers.According to the morphological measurement records, the results revealed the existence of Limnodrilus hoffmeisteri Claparede 1862, L. claparedeianus Ratzel, 1868 and L. cervix Brinkhurst 1963. Other two groups of specimens, with short penis sheath, were identified by molecular technology as L. hoffmeisteri complex, and L. claparedeianus.-cervix. Both species were considered as new record for Iraqi fauna, and had been registered in NCBI under the accession number LC497073 and LC497074 respectively According to the morphological measurements records, the results revealed the existence of Limnodrilus hoffmeisteri Claparede 1862, L. claparedeianus Ratzel, 1868 and L. cervix Brinkhurst 1963, which identified by molecular analysis using 18S rRNA gene and DNA sequencing recorded  L. hoffmeisteri complex, This species is a new record in Iraq, and has been registered in NCBI under the accession number LC497073. There was also specimen identified by molecular analysis using 18S rRNA gene and DNA sequencing recorded L. Claparedeianus –cervix. Also, this species is a new record in Iraq, and has been registered in NCBI under the accession number LC497074. ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Keyword: Limnodrilus hoffmeisteri complex, Iraq, LC497073, NCBI, Limnodrilus hoffmeisteri, L. Claparedeianus, L. cervix, L. Claparedeianus –cervix, LC 497073. *Part of M.Sc. Thesis of Research Sludge worms samples were collected from the Tigers River sediment in Al Sarafiya district, / Baghdad- Iraq. Biometric morphological measurement focusing on the form of penis sheath and chaetal morphology, in addition to molecular analysis using 18s rRNA gene, were used for species identification. According to the morphological measurements records, the results revealed the existence of two groups of Limnodrilus hoffmeisteri Claparède 1862 Individuals have long penis sheath with distal end with symmetrical or asymmetrical hood, while other individuals with short penis sheath with circular plate- like hood, which identified by molecular analysis as L. hoffmeisteri complex, and the isolate 18S rRNA  recorded with the accession number LC497073 Two groups of very long penis sheath identified as L. claparedeianus Ratzel, 1868, and L. cervix Brinkhurst 1963, with dorsal and ventral projections.  There are also a group of specimens with short penis sheath, which identified by molecular techniques as L. Claparedeianus –cervix 18S rRNA encoding genomic sequence was resented to the NCBI, recorded with the accession number LC497074.  Limnodrilus hoffmeisteri complex and L. claparedeianus – cervix were considered as new records for Iraq.  

Aquatic Oligochaeta (Annalida:Clitellata) as Bio Indication for Sediment Quality Assessment in Tigris River Within Baghdad City /Iraq

تشكل الديدان قليلة الاهلاب المائية مجموعة مهمة من لافقريات القاع الكبيرة التي حظيت بأهمية بالغة  كمؤشرات احيائية جيدة لتقييم التلوث وتحديد درجته في المسطحات المائية . ومن هنا جاءت فكرة الدراسة  الحالية التي استهدفت دراسة تأثير مخلفات مدينة بغداد على نهر دجلة بأستخدام  مجتمع قليلة الاهلاب المائية  كمؤشرات  احيائية. واخُتيرت لهذا الغرض اربع مواقع على طول نهر دجلة  داخل مدينة بغداد ، اذ كان الموقع الاول (م1) في اعلى مجرى النهر،  والموقعان الثاني والثالث  (م2 وم3) في وسط  مجرى النهر،  اما الموقع الرابع (م4) فكان اسفل مجرى لنهر. استخدمت في الدراسة الحالية العديد من الادلة الاحيائية ،فتراوحت النسبة المئوية لافراد قليلة الاهلاب المائية ضمن اللافقريات مابين 49.2-51.28% ، اما النسبة المئوية لافراد Tubificidaeضمن لافقريات القاع فسجلت اعلى نسبة لها في الموقع (م4) و بلغت 26.95% واقل نسبة في (م1) كانت 14.45% ، وتراوحت قيم دليل التلوث D بين 0.52-0.34 ، بينما كانت اعلى  نسبة افراد قليلة الاهلاب المائية الى يرقات ثنائية الاجنحة   في (م4) اذ بلغت 3.5 واقل نسبة لها 2.6 في (م1) ، وتراوحت النسبة المئوية لافراد النوع L.hoffmisteri بين 35-56%، اما دليل الجودة الاحيائي Io فسجل اعلى قيمة 9.89 في (م1) واوطأ قيمة 5.57 في (م4)،في حين سجل الدليل المركب للجودة الاحيائية (Eo) قيمة C5 في (م1)بينما سجل قيمة C4 وD3 و E3 في المواقع الثلاثة الاخرى، اما قيم دليل التلوث للراسب IOBS  فتراوحت بين 2.55 في  (م1) و 1.15 في (م4) وسجلت  النسبة المئوية لافراد تحت العائلة Tubificinae عديمة الاهلاب الشعرية ضمن قليلة الاهلاب المائية (TUSP) اعلى قيمة لها (52.57%) في (م4) واقل قيمة (28.68 % ) في (م1) . بلغت اعلى قيمة لمؤشر غزارة الانواع  7.35 في (م1) واقل قيمة 6.12 في (م3)، و سجل مؤشر شانون وينر قيم متقاربة في مواقع الدراسة  فتراوحت بين  0.06 و 0.049 بت/فرد ، اما قيم مؤشر تجانس ظهور الانواع فتراوحت بين 0.016 و 0.018.  وبالاستناد الى المؤشرات اعلاه ،يتأثر نهر دجلة بالفعاليات البشرية اثناء مروره بمدينة بغداد ويُعد ملوثاً تلوثاً خفيف  ، اذ اعتبر الموقع (م1) اقل المواقع تلوثاً كونه اول نقطة لدخول نهر دجلة لمدينة بغداد وبعدها بدأ التلوث بالازدياد التدريجي وصولاً الى الموقع الاخير (م4).Aquatic Oligochaeta is an important group of Macroinvertebrates that has been very remarkable as bioindicators for assessing water pollution and determining its degree in water bodies. Hence, the idea of the current study aims at studying the impact of Baghdad effluents on the Tigris River by using oligochaetes community as bioindicators . For this purpose, four sites along the inside of Baghdad has been chosen. Site S1 has been located upstream, site S2 and S3 has been at midstream and site S4 at the downstream of the River.This investigation has used different types of biological indicators, including the  percentage of oligochaeta  within benthic invertebrates, which ranged from 49.2-51.28%. The highest percentage of the tubificid worms in the benthic samples has been 26.95% and recorded at S4, while the lowest percentage has been 14.45% recorded at S1. Pollution index D ranged between 0.34 and 0.52. The highest value of the ratio of  oligochaeta to Chironomidae larvae has been 3.5 recorded at S4, while the lowest value has been 2.6 reported at S1. The percentage of L. hoffmeisteri within the oligochaetes community has been from 35-56%.  The highest value of  biological quality index Io has been   9.89  recorded at S1, and the lowest value has been (5.57)  recorded in S4.  A Composite index of Biological quality  (Eo) index recorded as C5 in S1 and C4,D3 and E3 in the other sites.  Oligochaeta index of sediment bioindication (IOBS) values ranged between 2.55 at S1 and 1.15 at S4. The tubicid index of sediment TUSP reported at d the highest value (52.57%) at  S4 where as the lowest value has been 28.68% at S1. The highest species richness value has been 7.35  recorded at S1 and the lowest value has been 6.12 at S3. Shannon- Weiner diversity index (H) ranged from 0.06-0.049 Bit/ind. Species uniformity index (E) has been 0.018-0.016.It is clear from the results that most of the biological indices indicate that the Tigris River sediment has been slightly impacted by anthropogenic activity during its passage through the Capital Baghdad.  S1 is considered as a reference site, as it has presented the first point of entry of the Tigris River to Baghdad and then the sediment gradually  has become polluted to reach its highest degree in  the last site S4 after passing through several  slightly polluted sites

New records of Turbellarian Platyhelminthes from Al-Dalmage lake / Iraq

A total of 437 individuals of Turbellarin Platyhelminthes were sorted from benthic samples collected monthly for a period of seven months( April to November 2013 ) from AL-Dalmage lake, a part of middle section for main outfall drain south of Baghdad. They were identified as Gyratrix hermaphroditus, Stenostomum leucops ,Stenostomum unicolar and Stenostomum bryophilum ,The relative abundance of worms decreased during hot season which (May to September) ,where they start rising again. The species were studied alive , the identification criteria were illustrated by photos. G. hermaphroditus was the most abundant species among the four species

Association of Aquatic worms and infected snails with Digenean larvae

Six species of aquatic snails were sorted from three sites, the irrigation canal of Baghdad University campus (S1), River Tigris at Al-Za'afaraniah district / Baghdad(S2) , and River Euphrates at Al-Haideriah district Al-Najaf province(S2). The species included Melanopsis nodosa ;Melanoides tuberculata ; Thaiodaxsas jordani ; Lymnaea auricularia ; Physa acuta and Bellamya bengalensis. The first specis recorded the highest total number and was found in high density in the R. Euphrates site (S3), while the last species was the most widely distributed species, and found in all study sites. The last three species were found in Tigris river (S2) , while the first and last species were collected from the irrigation canal (S1).The result revealed that the species M. nodosa, M. tuberculata and L. auricularia were infected with Digenean larval stages, and the first species recorded the highest infection percentage of 60.04%, and the lowest percentage of 5.70% was recorded in L. auriculari , while M. tuberculata recorded a percentage of 38.98%.The oligochaetes Chaetogaster limnaei was sorted from the mantle cavity of L. auriculari and P. acuta, and it was noted that the first species accommodated more worms numbers than the second species. Twelve Species of family Naididae worms (subfamily Naidinae and subfamily Pristininae) , in addition to Aeolosoma leidyi of family Aeolosomatidae were sorted from the specific aquarium of each snail species. The leech Glossiphonia heteroclite was also recorded. The Nematodes worms were recorded the highest number sorted from the aquarium of L.auricularia, which are the most associate species, and 10 species of 49 individuals of worms were sorted from its aquarium, specially Dero ( Dero)digitata. In general, the infected snails, M. nodusa, M. tuberculata, and L. auricularia showed the highest association with worms, and from their aquaria 48, 37 , and 49 individuals of worms . with a number of 8,3, and 18 species respectively