Species abundance distributions and numerical dominance in gastrointestinal helminth communities of fish hosts.

The abundances of different species in a parasite community are never similar: there is typically one or a few numerically dominant species and many species with low abundance. Here, we determine whether basic features of parasite communities are associated with strong dominance by one or a few species, among 39 component communities of gastrointestinal helminths in marine fishes from Brazil. First, we tested whether the shape of the species abundance distribution in these communities fits that predicted by several theoretical models, using a goodness-of-fit procedure. Only the canonical lognormal model could be rejected for 5 out of 39 communities; all other comparisons of observed and predicted abundance distributions showed no significant differences, although this may be due to limited statistical power. Second, we used the ratio between the abundance of the most abundant species and either the second or third most abundant species, as indices of dominance; these show, for instance, that the dominant species in a community is typically twice, but sometimes over ten times, as abundant as the next most abundant species. We found that these ratios were not influenced by either the community's species richness, the mean number of individual parasites per host, or the taxonomic identity of the dominant species. However, the abundance ratio between the first and third most abundant species in a community was significantly correlated with an independent index of species interactivity, based on the likelihood that the different parasite species in a component community co-occur in the same host individuals: the difference in abundance between the dominant and third most abundant species was greater in communities characterized by weak interactions. These findings suggest that strong interactions may lead to greater evenness in the abundance of species, and that numerical dominance is more likely to result from interspecific differences in recruitment rates.

Parasite biodiversity and its determinants in coastal marine teleost fishes of Brazil.

Recent studies of the forces behind the diversification of parasite assemblages have shed light on many aspects of parasite biodiversity. By using only parasite species richness as their measure of diversity, however, previous investigations have ignored the relatedness among parasite species and the taxonomic structure of the assemblages, which contain much information about their evolutionary origins. Here, we performed a comparative analysis across 50 species of fish from the coast of Brazil; we evaluated the effects of several host traits (body size, social behaviour, feeding habits, preference for benthic vs. pelagic habitats, depth range, and ability to enter brackish waters) on the diversity of their assemblages of metazoan parasites. As measures of diversity, we used parasite species richness, as well as the average taxonomic distinctness of the assemblage and its variance; the latter measures are based on the average taxonomic distance between any two parasite species in an assemblage. Unlike parasite species richness, taxonomic distinctness was unaffected by the number of host individuals examined per species. Fish body length proved to be the main predictor of parasite species richness, even when controlling for the confounding influences of host phylogeny and sampling effort, although it did not correlate with measures of parasite taxonomic distinctness. Predatory fish also had higher parasite species richness than planktivores, but this trend could not be confirmed using phylogenetically independent contrasts between host taxa. The main host feature associated with the taxonomic diversity of parasites was schooling behaviour, with schooling fish having more taxonomically diverse parasite assemblages than those of their non-schooling relatives. When focusing on endoparasite species only, both predatory feeding habits and a broad depth range were associated with the taxonomic distinctness of parasites. Our results suggest that certain host traits (i.e. body size) determine how many parasite species a host can accumulate over evolutionary time, whereas different host features influence the processes causing the taxonomic diversification of parasite assemblages.