The worm's eye view of community ecology

Abstract

The study of parasites in the context of community level organization, either as parasites embedded within host communities, or as parasite communities themselves, is now quite prevalent in parasitology and ecology today. However, this was not always the case. In terms of publications, there was almost no consideration of parasite interactions at the community level for most of the first half of the last century. Papers in The Journal of Parasitology by Clark Read (1951) and John Holmes (1961) were the defining contributions to the beginning of the field, and the ideas elaborated by these two parasitologists still inspire current debates on parasite community structure today. There are several probable explanations for why investigation of parasite communities was not popular during the early part of the century. Most likely, it was related to funding sources, and the strong biomedical rubric that has guided parasitological studies for most of the last century. The intensity of focus on treatment and control of parasites of medical and veterinary importance often resulted in indifference to the natural and evolutionary histories of the parasites. Fortunately, this situation has changed, and there has been an exponential growth of ideas based on ecological and evolutionary theory, especially since the beginning of this century. We are now entering into areas of inquiry that the early investigators probably never dreamed of. For example, it was only in 1997 that "Food webs: A plea for parasites" by Marcogliese and Cone (1997) made eloquent arguments for why parasites should be included in studies of food

Life-cycle mediated effects of urbanization on parasite communities in the estuarine fish, Fundulus heteroclitus

“…heteroclitus movement [50]. These studies illustrate that landscape alterations have the potential to alter free-living host community structure; given that indirect life-cycle parasites require stable trophic interactions [5] between animals across trophic levels, altering the structure of the free-living community will necessarily be reflected in the parasite community [51].…”

“…Subsequently, a subset of the species from the regional pool will colonize a particular site depending on dispersal and exposure probability. In essence, our data suggests that the observed parasite community within a host and the factors that determine what parasites you find in that host are dependent on the scale at which the study is conducted because of different abiotic and biotic filters [20,51,53,54].…”