Parasites Shape Community Structure and Dynamics in Freshwater Crustaceans Cambridge.Org/Par
Parasitology Parasites shape community structure and dynamics in freshwater crustaceans cambridge.org/par Olwyn C. Friesen1 , Sarah Goellner2 , Robert Poulin1 and Clément Lagrue1,3 1 2 Research Article Department of Zoology, 340 Great King St, University of Otago, Dunedin 9016, New Zealand; Center for Integrative Infectious Diseases, Im Neuenheimer Feld 344, University of Heidelberg, Heidelberg 69120, Germany 3 Cite this article: Friesen OC, Goellner S, and Department of Biological Sciences, CW 405, Biological Sciences Building, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Poulin R, Lagrue C (2020). Parasites shape Alberta T6G 2E9, Canada community structure and dynamics in freshwater crustaceans. Parasitology 147, Abstract 182–193. https://doi.org/10.1017/ S0031182019001483 Parasites directly and indirectly influence the important interactions among hosts such as competition and predation through modifications of behaviour, reproduction and survival. Received: 24 June 2019 Such impacts can affect local biodiversity, relative abundance of host species and structuring Revised: 27 September 2019 Accepted: 27 September 2019 of communities and ecosystems. Despite having a firm theoretical basis for the potential First published online: 4 November 2019 effects of parasites on ecosystems, there is a scarcity of experimental data to validate these hypotheses, making our inferences about this topic more circumstantial. To quantitatively Key words: test parasites’ role in structuring host communities, we set up a controlled, multigenerational Host community; parasites; population dynamics; species composition mesocosm experiment involving four sympatric freshwater crustacean species that share up to four parasite species. Mesocosms were assigned to either of two different treatments, low or Author for correspondence: high parasite exposure. We found that the trematode Maritrema poulini differentially influ- Olwyn C.
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