Ecosystem energetic implications of parasite and free-living biomass in three estuaries

Kuris, Armand M.; Hechinger, Ryan F.; Shaw, Jenny C.; Whitney, Kathleen L.; Aguirre-Macedo, M. Leopoldina; Boch, Charlie A.; Dobson, Andrew; Dunham, Eleca J.; Fredensborg, Brian L.; Huspeni, Todd C.; Lorda, Julio; Mababa, Luzviminda; Mancini, Frank T; Mora, Adrienne B.; Pickering, Maria; Talhouk, Nadia L.; Torchin, Mark E.; Lafferty, Kevin D.

doi:10.1038/nature06970

Cited by 521 publications

(467 citation statements)

References 26 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

454

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…2008; Kuris et al . 2008). Moreover, parasites' complex life histories, which commonly involve different sets of hosts for different life stages, render them vulnerable to secondary extinctions and therefore decrease network robustness (Lafferty & Kuris 2009).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Parasites may also have one or more free‐living stages which can be important prey for free‐living predators (Combes 1996; Kuris et al . 2008). Further, parasites vary in the ways in which they are transmitted between hosts: they can actively infect new hosts, be ingested as eggs or cysts, or be ingested as concomitant prey along with the current host (Kuris et al .…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Further, parasites vary in the ways in which they are transmitted between hosts: they can actively infect new hosts, be ingested as eggs or cysts, or be ingested as concomitant prey along with the current host (Kuris et al . 2008; Thieltges et al . 2013).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Concomitant predation on parasites is highly variable but constrains the ways in which parasites contribute to food web structure

Cirtwill

Stouffer

2015

Journal of Animal Ecology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Summary Previous analyses of empirical food webs (the networks of who eats whom in a community) have revealed that parasites exert a strong influence over observed food web structure and alter many network properties such as connectance and degree distributions. It remains unclear, however, whether these community‐level effects are fully explained by differences in the ways that parasites and free‐living species interact within a food web.To rigorously quantify the interrelationship between food web structure, the types of species in a web and the distinct types of feeding links between them, we introduce a shared methodology to quantify the structural roles of both species and feeding links. Roles are quantified based on the frequencies with which a species (or link) appears in different food web motifs – the building blocks of networks.We hypothesized that different types of species (e.g. top predators, basal resources, parasites) and different types of links between species (e.g. classic predation, parasitism, concomitant predation on parasites along with their hosts) will show characteristic differences in their food web roles.We found that parasites do indeed have unique structural roles in food webs. Moreover, we demonstrate that different types of feeding links (e.g. parasitism, predation or concomitant predation) are distributed differently in a food web context. More than any other interaction type, concomitant predation appears to constrain the roles of parasites. In contrast, concomitant predation links themselves have more variable roles than any other type of interaction.Together, our results provide a novel perspective on how both species and feeding link composition shape the structure of an ecological community and vice versa.

show abstract

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Concomitant predation on parasites is highly variable but constrains the ways in which parasites contribute to food web structure

Cirtwill

Stouffer

2015

Journal of Animal Ecology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…More recent work, both theoretical and experimental/observational, testifies to the fact that real food-webs are indeed not randomly connected, Erdős-Rényi ones. Thus Kuris et al [7], in a study of three estuarine ecosystems, which-seminally-included parasites (whose biomass exceeded that of top predators), found a preponderance of predator-prey interactions in these networks. This coincides with a recent computer study by Allesina & Pascual [8] of some 10 000 randomly assembled food-webs, which found that those with a disproportionate fraction of predator-prey interactions were significantly more likely to be stable (all eigenvalues of the system in the left half-plane).…”

Section: Stability and Complexity In Ecosystems: 1960s To 2000smentioning

confidence: 99%

Networks and webs in ecosystems and financial systems

May

2013

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper briefly outlines our growing understanding of the relationships between the network structure of ecological networks—both in mathematical models and in the real world—and their consequent dynamical properties. These are interesting, inter alia, because they affect the system’s ability to withstand disturbance, whether natural or human-created. The paper also sketches recent interest in the potential relevance of this work to ‘systemic risk’ and regulatory measures in banking systems, emphasizing the similarities and differences. I conclude with some cautions against drawing excessively general conclusions from any such models.

show abstract

“…(vi) Parasites are increasingly recognized as common constituents of ecological networks (Lafferty et al 2006(Lafferty et al , 2008Kuris et al 2008). Are their roles different from those of free-living species?…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%