Fig. 4

Dendrogram depicting the relationships of twelve cestodes. Cestodes recovered from emerald shiner (Notropis atherinoides), golden shiner (Notemigonus crysoleucas) and sand shiner (Notropis stramineus) that were collected from baitfish in Michigan were compared to 20 reference sequences (18 Schyzocotyle acheilognathi reference sequences, 1 Schyzocotyle nayarensis sequence, and 1 Bothricephalus claviceps sequence as an outgroup). The internal transcribed spacer region (ITS1-5.8S-ITS2) with approximate size of 1.4 kb was used as a molecular marker. The dendrogram was generated in MEGA6 [24] using neighbor-joining [25], whereby evolutionary distances were assessed via the Tamura-Nei method [37] with gamma distribution as determined using the lowest Bayesian information criterion value. The final data set contained a total of 1124 positions (complete deletion option) and only bootstrap values ≥ 70 (1000 replicates) are displayed at the nodes. Each sequence displayed the accession number, host species and origin

Scale-bar: number of substitutions per nucleotide site