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      Stable-isotope analysis: a neglected tool for placing parasites in food webs

      , ,
      Journal of Helminthology
      Cambridge University Press (CUP)

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          Abstract

          Parasites are often overlooked in the construction of food webs, despite their ubiquitous presence in almost every type of ecosystem. Researchers who do recognize their importance often struggle to include parasites using classical food-web theory, mainly due to the parasites' multiple hosts and life stages. A novel approach using compound-specific stable-isotope analysis promises to provide considerable insight into the energetic exchanges of parasite and host, which may solve some of the issues inherent in incorporating parasites using a classical approach. Understanding the role of parasites within food webs, and tracing the associated biomass transfers, are crucial to constructing new models that will expand our knowledge of food webs. This mini-review focuses on stable-isotope studies published in the past decade, and introduces compound-specific stable-isotope analysis as a powerful, but underutilized, newly developed tool that may answer many unresolved questions regarding the role of parasites in food webs.

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          Most cited references52

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          USING STABLE ISOTOPES TO ESTIMATE TROPHIC POSITION: MODELS, METHODS, AND ASSUMPTIONS

          David Post (2002)
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            Parasites in food webs: the ultimate missing links

            Parasitism is the most common consumer strategy among organisms, yet only recently has there been a call for the inclusion of infectious disease agents in food webs. The value of this effort hinges on whether parasites affect food-web properties. Increasing evidence suggests that parasites have the potential to uniquely alter food-web topology in terms of chain length, connectance and robustness. In addition, parasites might affect food-web stability, interaction strength and energy flow. Food-web structure also affects infectious disease dynamics because parasites depend on the ecological networks in which they live. Empirically, incorporating parasites into food webs is straightforward. We may start with existing food webs and add parasites as nodes, or we may try to build food webs around systems for which we already have a good understanding of infectious processes. In the future, perhaps researchers will add parasites while they construct food webs. Less clear is how food-web theory can accommodate parasites. This is a deep and central problem in theoretical biology and applied mathematics. For instance, is representing parasites with complex life cycles as a single node equivalent to representing other species with ontogenetic niche shifts as a single node? Can parasitism fit into fundamental frameworks such as the niche model? Can we integrate infectious disease models into the emerging field of dynamic food-web modelling? Future progress will benefit from interdisciplinary collaborations between ecologists and infectious disease biologists.
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              The diversity-stability debate.

              There exists little doubt that the Earth's biodiversity is declining. The Nature Conservancy, for example, has documented that one-third of the plant and animal species in the United States are now at risk of extinction. The problem is a monumental one, and forces us to consider in depth how we expect ecosystems, which ultimately are our life-support systems, to respond to reductions in diversity. This issue--commonly referred to as the diversity-stability debate--is the subject of this review, which synthesizes historical ideas with recent advances. Both theory and empirical evidence agree that we should expect declines in diversity to accelerate the simplification of ecological communities.
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                Author and article information

                Journal
                Journal of Helminthology
                J. Helminthol.
                Cambridge University Press (CUP)
                0022-149X
                1475-2697
                January 2019
                February 28 2018
                January 2019
                : 93
                : 1
                : 1-7
                Article
                10.1017/S0022149X17001201
                29486814
                35daea12-f289-46c9-bd41-f6f599d61521
                © 2019

                https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms

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