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      Parasite richness and abundance within aquatic macroinvertebrates: testing the roles of host- and habitat-level factors

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      Ecosphere
      Wiley

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          Abstract

          <p class="first" id="P1">The importance of parasites as both members of biological communities and as structuring agents of host communities has been increasingly emphasized. Yet parasites of aquatic macroinvertebrates and the environmental factors regulating their richness and abundance remain poorly studied. Here we quantified parasite richness and abundance within 12 genera of odonate naiads and opportunistically sampled four additional orders of aquatic macroinvertebrates from 35 freshwater ponds in the San Francisco Bay Area of California, USA. We also tested the relative contributions of host- and habitat-level factors in driving patterns of infection abundance for the most commonly encountered parasite (the trematode <i>Haematoloechus</i> sp.) in nymphal damselflies and dragonflies using hierarchical generalized linear mixed models. Over the course of two years, we quantified the presence and intensity of parasites from 1,612 individuals. We identified six parasite taxa: two digenetic trematodes, one larval nematode, one larval acanthocephalan, one gregarine, and a mite, for which the highest infection prevalence (39%) occurred in the damselfly genus, <i>Ishnura</i> sp. Based on the hierarchical analysis of <i>Haematoloechus</i> sp. occurrence, infection prevalence and abundance were associated predominantly with site-level factors, including definitive host (frog) presence, nymphal odonate density, water pH and conductivity. In addition, host suborder interacted with the presence of fishes, such that damselflies had higher infection rates in sites with fish relative to those without, whereas the opposite was true for dragonfly nymphs. These findings offer insights into the potential interaction between host- and site-level factors in shaping parasite populations within macroinvertebrate taxa. </p>

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          The Paradox of the Plankton

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            Stochastic community assembly causes higher biodiversity in more productive environments.

            Net primary productivity is a principal driver of biodiversity; large-scale regions with higher productivity generally have more species. This pattern emerges because beta-diversity (compositional variation across local sites) increases with productivity, but the mechanisms underlying this phenomenon are unknown. Using data from a long-term experiment in replicate ponds, I show that higher beta-diversity at higher productivity resulted from a stronger role for stochastic relative to deterministic assembly processes with increasing productivity. This shift in the relative importance of stochasticity was most consistent with the hypothesis of more intense priority effects leading to multiple stable equilibria at higher productivity. Thus, shifts in community assembly mechanisms across a productivity gradient may underlie one of the most prominent biodiversity gradients on the planet.
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              Parasites dominate food web links.

              Parasitism is the most common animal lifestyle, yet food webs rarely include parasites. The few earlier studies have indicated that including parasites leads to obvious increases in species richness, number of links, and food chain length. A less obvious result was that adding parasites slightly reduced connectance, a key metric considered to affect food web stability. However, reported reductions in connectance after the addition of parasites resulted from an inappropriate calculation. Two alternative corrective approaches applied to four published studies yield an opposite result: parasites increase connectance, sometimes dramatically. In addition, we find that parasites can greatly affect other food web statistics, such as nestedness (asymmetry of interactions), chain length, and linkage density. Furthermore, whereas most food webs find that top trophic levels are least vulnerable to natural enemies, the inclusion of parasites revealed that mid-trophic levels, not low trophic levels, suffered the highest vulnerability to natural enemies. These results show that food webs are very incomplete without parasites. Most notably, recognition of parasite links may have important consequences for ecosystem stability because they can increase connectance and nestedness.
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                Author and article information

                Journal
                Ecosphere
                Ecosphere
                Wiley
                21508925
                April 2018
                April 2018
                April 16 2018
                : 9
                : 4
                : e02188
                Affiliations
                [1 ]Ecology and Evolutionary Biology; University of Colorado; Boulder Colorado 80309 USA
                Article
                10.1002/ecs2.2188
                6159337
                30271654
                89f23a19-16f1-4ac9-bae4-8408b75d5242
                © 2018

                http://doi.wiley.com/10.1002/tdm_license_1.1

                http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

                http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

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