Community structure of digenean parasites of sparid and labrid fishes of the Mediterranean sea: a new approach
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 biologic...
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Veröffentlicht in: | Parasitology 1999-12, Vol.119 (6), p.635-648 |
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Zusammenfassung: | 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. |
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ISSN: | 0031-1820 1469-8161 |
DOI: | 10.1017/S0031182099005077 |