Community structure of digenean parasites of sparid and labrid fishes of the Mediterranean sea: A new approach
Résumé
The aim of this work was to study the structure of the parasite communities of Digeneans of 2 families of Teleost fishes (Sparidae and Labridae) of the Mediterranean sea. We tried to quantify the importance of both the microhabitat requirements of the parasite species and the effect of host biological factors on the parasite communities. We applied, for the first time in parasite community studies, the Canonical Correspondence Analysis (CCA) to analyse (i) the spatial distribution of parasite species within the digestive tract of the hosts; (ii) the host's biological factors (such as diet, host length, gregariousness and abundance) that may influence this spatial distribution of parasite species. Our results showed that potential microhabitats were vacant in the 2 host families studied revealing a lack of niche saturation because either there was little inter- and/or intraspecific competition or there were enough available space and resources within the host. Our results also indicated that the position of the parasite in the digestive tract is much more important than host biological factors for the structure of parasite community. Finally, we highlight the potential use of the CCA method for controlling for phylogenetic constraints in multi-species analyses.
Mots clés
Mediterranean Sea
nonhuman
Animals
Ecosystem
parasite
Fishes
Fish
article
diet
Canonical Correspondence Analysis
community
Digeneans
Digestive System
fish disease
Fish Diseases
host
Host-Parasite Relations
Parasite community
phylogeny
priority journal
Specificity
Statistics
teleost
Trematoda
Trematode Infections