A histological atlas for the Palinuridae (Crustacea: Decapoda: Achelata): A guide to parasite discovery and spotting the abnormal in spiny lobsters.

Crustaceans suffer from diseases that can alter their survival and ecology with additional economic consequences for fisheries and aquaculture. Many parasites have been described from crustaceans and with the advent of novel technologies such as next generation sequencing, the discovery of novel parasites has become increasingly efficient. Molecular techniques are beginning to surpass more conventional tools for parasite discovery, but they typically do not provide information on pathology. Histopathology remains one of the least expensive methods for parasite discovery and allows for both detection of parasites and descriptions of the pathology they cause. When used in concert with modern molecular and electron microscopy techniques, the approach is powerful; however, there are few informational tools for the interpretation of histological slides from crustaceans. Those available do not provide comprehensive images of all organs and early works were limited to lower resolution than currently available. More recent texts provide in-depth details of infection in histological section, but few provide images of healthy material or describe a baseline from which to compare. Here, we provide a series of image plates derived from histologically processed tissues from three palinurid lobsters: Panulirus argus, Palinurus elephas and Panulirus guttatus. Histology from these lobsters shows high visual similarity in all tissue types. We provide a histological atlas of healthy tissue that can be used as a baseline resource for pathobiologists working on these common species (and related crustaceans) and we discuss how disease may result in visual aberrations to these tissues.

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Copyright © 2019. Published by Elsevier Inc.