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.

Parasites primarily affect food web structure through changes to diversity and complexity. However, compared to free-living species, their life-history traits lead to more complex feeding niches and altered motifs.

SUMMARY Growing interest in ecology has recently focused on the hypothesis that community diversity can mediate infection levels and disease (‘dilution effect’). In turn, biodiversity loss — a widespread consequence of environmental change — can indirectly promote increases in disease, including those of medical and veterinary importance. While this work has focused primarily on correlational studies involving vector-borne microparasite diseases (e.g. Lyme disease, West Nile virus), we argue that parasites with complex life cycles (e.g. helminths, protists, myxosporeans and many fungi) offer an excellent additional model in which to experimentally address mechanistic questions underlying the dilution effect. Here, we unite recent ecological research on the dilution effect in microparasites with decades of parasitological research on the decoy effect in macroparasites to explore key questions surrounding the relationship between community structure and disease. We find consistent evidence that community diversity significantly alters parasite transmission and pathology under laboratory as well as natural conditions. Empirical examples and simple transmission models highlight the diversity of mechanisms through which such changes occur, typically involving predators, parasite decoys, low competency hosts or other parasites. However, the degree of transmission reduction varies among diluting species, parasite stage, and across spatial scales, challenging efforts to make quantitative, taxon-specific predictions about disease. Taken together, this synthesis highlights the broad link between community structure and disease while underscoring the importance of mitigating ongoing changes in biological communities owing to species introductions and extirpations.

No abstract

The transmission success of free-living larval stages of endohelminths is generally modulated by a variety of abiotic and biotic environmental factors. Whereas the role of abiotic factors (including anthropogenic pollutants) has been in focus in numerous studies and summarized in reviews, the role of biotic factors has received much less attention. Here, we review the existing body of literature from the fields of parasitology and ecology and recognize 6 different types of biotic factors with the potential to alter larval transmission processes. We found that experimental studies generally indicate strong effects of biotic factors, and the latter emerge as potentially important, underestimated determinants in the transmission ecology of free-living endohelminth stages. This implies that biodiversity, in general, should have significant effects on parasite transmission and population dynamics. These effects are likely to interact with natural abiotic factors and anthropogenic pollutants. Investigating the interplay of abiotic and biotic factors will not only be crucial for a thorough understanding of parasite transmission processes, but will also be a prerequisite to anticipate the effects of climate and other global changes on helminth parasites and their host communities.