Parasites & Vectors BioMed Central Research Open Access Composition and structure of the parasite faunas of cod, Gadus morhua L. (Teleostei: Gadidae), in the North East Atlantic Diana Perdiguero-Alonso1, Francisco E Montero2, Juan Antonio Raga1 and Aneta Kostadinova*1,3 Address: 1Marine Zoology Unit, Cavanilles Institute of Biodiversity and Evolutionary Biology, University of Valencia, PO Box 22085, 46071, Valencia, Spain, 2Department of Animal Biology, Plant Biology and Ecology, Autonomous University of Barcelona, Campus Universitari, 08193, Bellaterra, Barcelona, Spain and 3Central Laboratory of General Ecology, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, 2 Gagarin Street, 1113, Sofia, Bulgaria Email: Diana Perdiguero-Alonso -
[email protected]; Francisco E Montero -
[email protected]; Juan Antonio Raga -
[email protected]; Aneta Kostadinova* -
[email protected] * Corresponding author Published: 18 July 2008 Received: 4 June 2008 Accepted: 18 July 2008 Parasites & Vectors 2008, 1:23 doi:10.1186/1756-3305-1-23 This article is available from: http://www.parasitesandvectors.com/content/1/1/23 © 2008 Perdiguero-Alonso et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Abstract Background: Although numerous studies on parasites of the Atlantic cod, Gadus morhua L. have been conducted in the North Atlantic, comparative analyses on local cod parasite faunas are virtually lacking. The present study is based on examination of large samples of cod from six geographical areas of the North East Atlantic which yielded abundant baseline data on parasite distribution and abundance.