GENETICS, EVOLUTION, AND PHYLOGENY - SHORT COMMUNICATION Geographical distribution and hosts of the cestode Paranoplocephala omphalodes (Hermann, 1783) Lühe, 1910 in Russia and adjacent territories Pavel Vlasenko 1 & Sergey Abramov 1 & Sergey Bugmyrin 2 & Tamara Dupal 1 & Nataliya Fomenko 3 & Anton Gromov 4 & Eugeny Zakharov 5 & Vadim Ilyashenko 6 & Zharkyn Kabdolov 7 & Artem Tikunov 8 & Egor Vlasov 9 & Anton Krivopalov 1 Received: 1 February 2019 /Accepted: 11 September 2019 # Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2019 Abstract Paranoplocephala omphalodes is a widespread parasite of voles. Low morphological variability within the genus Paranoplocephala has led to erroneous identification of P. omphalodes a wide range of definitive hosts. The use of molecular methods in the earlier investigations has confirmed that P. omphalodes parasitizes four vole species in Europe. We studied the distribution of P. omphalodes in Russia and Kazakhstan using molecular tools. The study of 3248 individuals of 20 arvicoline species confirmed a wide distribution of P. omphalodes. Cestodes of this species were found in Microtus arvalis, M. levis, M. agrestis, Arvicola amphibius, and also in Chionomys gud. Analysis of the mitochondrial gene cox1 variability revealed a low haplotype diversity in P. omphalodes in Eurasia. Keywords Paranoplocephala omphalodes . Cestodes . Voles . Haplotype . cox1 . Eurasia Introduction Cestodes of the genus Paranoplocephala Lühe, 1910 (family Anoplocephalidae) parasitizing the small intestine of arvicoline rodents are widespread in the Holarctic. Low mor- phological variability within the genus has led to erroneous identifications of Paranoplocephala omphalodes (Hermann, 1783) Lühe, 1910 in the wide range of definitive hosts (24 species of rodents from the 10 genera) (Ryzhikov et al. 1978), and hence to mistakes in the depiction of the geographical distribution of this cestode. Using molecular methods, Haukisalmi et al. (2004) have shown that several species of cestodes were identified previously as P. omphalodes by mor- phological criteria. It became apparent that the range of defin- itive hosts of P. omphalodes is restricted mainly to the rodents of the genus Microtus (subgenus Microtus): field vole M. agrestis (L., 1761), common vole M. arvalis (Pall., 1778), and east European vole M. levis (Miller, 1908) (Haukisalmi et al. 2004). In accordance with available molec- ular studies of rodent tapeworms, P. omphalodes is only found in the European part of the continent (Italy, Hungary, and Finland) (Haukisalmi et al. 2014). The information on the distribution of P. omphalodes in its definitive hosts in Russia was based entirely on morphological studies (Spasskii 1951; Section Editor: Guillermo Salgado-Maldonado * Anton Krivopalov krivopalov@gmail.com 1 Institute of Systematics and Ecology of Animals, Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Novosibirsk, Russia 2 Institute of Biology, Karelian Research Centre of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Petrozavodsk, Russia 3 AO Vector-Best, Novosibirsk, Russia 4 A.N. Severtsov Institute of Ecology and Evolution, The Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia 5 Institute of Biological Problems of Cryolithozone, Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Yakutsk, Russia 6 Kemerovo State University, Kemerovo, Russia 7 Pavlodar State Pedagogical University, Pavlodar, Kazakhstan 8 Institute of Chemical Biology and Fundamental Medicine, Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Novosibirsk, Russia 9 V.V. Alekhin Central-Chernozem State Nature Biosphere Reserve, Zapovednyi, Kursk Oblast, Russia Parasitology Research https://doi.org/10.1007/s00436-019-06462-z