Print PageThe Equilibrium Theory of Island Biogeography is broadly applied in many areas of ecology, evolution and conservation. For parasitic species, considering host individuals as islands is an interesting way to develop and test general models of parasite diversity. However, due to limited availability of appropriate data and because ecological characteristics and interactions of host populations can often distort relationships with the associated endoparasite community, only limited theoretical advancement has been made in this regard. Here we develop three hypotheses of parasite diversity using island biogeography theory as a model, and test each using data collected for parasite communities in 1,825 host individuals representing 84 fish species from the Upper Paraná River floodplain, Brazil.
Results/Conclusions
Host trophic position and body size (used as functional surrogates of colonization and extinction rates) were found to explain significant amounts of variation in mean parasite taxa richness (p = 0.006 and p < 0.001, respectively). The interaction between trophic position and body size yielded individual parasite richness levels consistent with predictions of our model based on island biogeography (p = 0.001). Reformulation of this model based on further refinement of host characteristics (e.g. life-history strategy, phylogeny), may improve mechanistic interpretation of parasite diversity patterns, and subsequent tests of other metacommunity models (i.e. species sorting, mass effects and neutral) may yield additional insight into the relative processes influencing distributions of individual parasite species and resulting community patterns.
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