Integrating climate and host richness as drivers of global parasite diversity

Abstract

Aim: Climate and host richness are essential drivers of global gradients in parasite diversity, and the few existing studies on parasites have mostly investigated their effects separately. The advantages of combining these factors into a single analytical framework include unravelling the relative roles of abiotic and biotic drivers of parasite diversity. We compiled a dataset of helminths of amphibians to investigate the direct and indirect effects of temperature seasonality, annual precipitation, precipitation seasonality and host richness as drivers of parasite diversity at the global scale. Our analyses focus not only on the least studied group of vertebrates regarding macroecology of parasite diversity, but also the host group most sensitive to climatic conditions, especially temperature seasonality and water availability.

Temporal dynamics of freshwater planktonic parasites inferred using a DNA metabarcoding time-series

“…Temperate freshwater environments experience temporal fluctuations in abiotic and biotic factors. These fluctuations can potentially influence the abundance, diversity and composition of different parasite communities across different seasons (Poulin, 2020 ; Martins et al ., 2021 ). For example, seasonal changes in parasite abundance have been linked to temporal shifts in host abundance (Ibelings et al ., 2011 ; Gsell et al ., 2013 ), diet and feeding preferences (Prati et al ., 2020 ).…”

Drivers of parasite β-diversity among anuran hosts depend on scale, realm and parasite group

“…We updated a global dataset on helminths parasitising anurans used for a previous study [31] through a systematic review of the literature published between 1970 and 2020 in the Google Scholar (scholar.google.com) and Web of Science (isiknowledge. com) databases.…”

Few studies of wild animal performance account for parasite infections: a systematic review

“…The degree to which parasites are considered in studies of animal performance may also depend on where study animals are collected. Although tropical climates are home to a greater biodiversity of hosts, and thus parasites (Kamiya et al, 2014;Martins et al, 2021), surveys and knowledge of vertebrate parasite fauna is greater in temperate zones (Poulin, 2010) suggesting that studies on hosts from temperate biomes may be more likely to take infection into account than tropical biomes. Despite the many documented effects of parasites on hosts, the extent to which studies on performance capacity in wild vertebrates take parasite infection into account is unknown, making it difficult to assess potential biases in the literature.…”

“…Because parasites can have strong effects on both behaviour and physiology, we predicted that parasite inclusion would not differ between study topics. We also predicted that parasite inclusion should be higher in more controlled environments such as experimental and laboratory studies, and thus, especially in taxa often transported and studied in the laboratory such as fish and birds (Kamiya et al, 2014;Martins et al, 2021). We finally predicted that parasite inclusion may be higher in studies on temperate species because of the greater taxonomic knowledge of vertebrate parasite fauna in temperate zones (Poulin, 2010).…”