Publication details
The structure of host-parasite communities: order and history
| Authors | |
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| Year of publication | 2003 |
| Type | Monograph |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | Species assemblages living in the fragmented habitats are not distributed randomly across their habitats. Nestedness presents a simple pattern of species assemblages organisation where depauperate assemblages are the subsets of species richer assemblages. As hosts present the isolated islands for parasite colonisation, we investigated the occurrence of nestedness at several scales in host-parasite relationships and the processes that may generate nestedness. The measure of order and disorder in the species distribution in the fragmented habitats proposed by Atmar and Patterson (1993) was applied. Our results showed that species compositions of parasite communities are not the results of pure stochastic processes. History and epidemiology may generate nestedness in the case of parasite assemblages. Nestedness in parasite species distribution could by explained by historical processes, i.e. by the concordance of host phylogeny inferred from parasite presence/absence data with the true host phylogeny (the cases of endoparasites of carnivores and rodents). The same result was found using intraspecific study when nestedness may be explained by phylogeographical pattern of hosts. When parasites are highly specific to their hosts (i.e. congeneric monogenean species to Cyprinidae fish species) nested pattern was not observed. Nestedness occurs in the several levels of species organization in host-parasite system. Host species among different sites showed a nested pattern, which may be explained by ecological recruitment of hosts. Parasite communities of selected hosts showed a nested pattern occurring in species-rich assemblages, which suggests that species competition is not a factor influencing the community structure. Parasite assemblages were nested in large-bodies fish species. Finally, we investigated the nested pattern in communities of congeneric monogenean parasites. Both the analyses among the different host individuals as well as among host microhabitats revealed nested pattern. Different colonization and extinction probabilities seem to be the important attributes driving nestedness in the case of parasite assemblages. Host ecology and parasite dynamics play important role in the structure of species assemblages. |