Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-rdxmf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-26T08:08:21.589Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Species abundance distributions and numerical dominance in gastrointestinal helminth communities of fish hosts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 September 2008

R. Poulin ,
J.L. Luque ,
F. Guilhaumon  and
D. Mouillot
R. Poulin*
Affiliation:
Department of Zoology, University of Otago, PO Box 56, Dunedin9054, New Zealand
J.L. Luque
Affiliation:
Departamento de Parasitologia Animal, Universidade Federal Rural do Rio de Janeiro, Caixa Postal 74.508, CEP 23851-970, Seropédica, RJ, Brazil
F. Guilhaumon
Affiliation:
UMR CNRS-UMII 5119 Ecosystèmes Lagunaires, Université Montpellier II, CC093, FR-34095Montpellier Cedex 5, France
D. Mouillot
Affiliation:
UMR CNRS-UMII 5119 Ecosystèmes Lagunaires, Université Montpellier II, CC093, FR-34095Montpellier Cedex 5, France
*
*E-mail: robert.poulin@stonebow.otago.ac.nz
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The abundances of different species in a parasite community are never similar: there is typically one or a few numerically dominant species and many species with low abundance. Here, we determine whether basic features of parasite communities are associated with strong dominance by one or a few species, among 39 component communities of gastrointestinal helminths in marine fishes from Brazil. First, we tested whether the shape of the species abundance distribution in these communities fits that predicted by several theoretical models, using a goodness-of-fit procedure. Only the canonical lognormal model could be rejected for 5 out of 39 communities; all other comparisons of observed and predicted abundance distributions showed no significant differences, although this may be due to limited statistical power. Second, we used the ratio between the abundance of the most abundant species and either the second or third most abundant species, as indices of dominance; these show, for instance, that the dominant species in a community is typically twice, but sometimes over ten times, as abundant as the next most abundant species. We found that these ratios were not influenced by either the community's species richness, the mean number of individual parasites per host, or the taxonomic identity of the dominant species. However, the abundance ratio between the first and third most abundant species in a community was significantly correlated with an independent index of species interactivity, based on the likelihood that the different parasite species in a component community co-occur in the same host individuals: the difference in abundance between the dominant and third most abundant species was greater in communities characterized by weak interactions. These findings suggest that strong interactions may lead to greater evenness in the abundance of species, and that numerical dominance is more likely to result from interspecific differences in recruitment rates.

Type
Research Papers
Information
Journal of Helminthology , Volume 82 , Issue 3 , September 2008 , pp. 193 - 202
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Aoki, I. (1995) Diversity and rank-abundance relationship concerning biotic compartments. Ecological Modelling 82, 21–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Arneberg, P., Skorping, A. & Read, A.F. (1998) Parasite abundance, body size, life histories, and the energetic equivalence rule. American Naturalist 151, 497–513.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Blackburn, T.M. & Gaston, K.J. (1997) A critical assessment of the form of the interspecific relationship between abundance and body size in animals. Journal of Animal Ecology 66, 233–249.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Damuth, J. (1981) Population density and body size in mammals. Nature 290, 699–700.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Figueiredo, J.L. & Menezes, N.A. (1978) Manual de peixes marinhos do sudeste do Brasil II. Teleostei (1). São Paulo, Museu de Zoologia, Universidade de São Paulo.Google Scholar
Figueiredo, J.L. & Menezes, N.A. (1980) Manual de peixes marinhos do sudeste de Brasil III. Teleostei (2). São Paulo, Museu de Zoologia, Universidade de São Paulo.Google Scholar
Figueiredo, J.L. & Menezes, N.A. (2000) Manual de peixes marinhos do sudeste do Brasil VI. Teleostei (5). São Paulo, Museu de Zoologia, Universidade de São Paulo.Google Scholar
Froese, R. & Pauly, D. (2007) Fish Base. World Wide Web electronic publication. www.fishbase.org, version (02/2007).Google Scholar
Frontier, S. (1985) Diversity and structure in aquatic ecosystems. Marine Biology Annual Review 23, 253–312.Google Scholar
Frontier, S. (1994) Species diversity as a fractal property of biomass. pp. 119–127in Novak, M.M. (Ed.) Fractals in the natural and applied sciences. Amsterdam, Elsevier.Google Scholar
Gaston, K.J. (1994) Rarity. London, Chapman & Hall.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gaston, K.J. & Blackburn, T.M. (2000) Pattern and process in macroecology. Oxford, Blackwell Science.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gray, J.S., Bjorgesaeter, A. & Ugland, K.I. (2006) On plotting species abundance distributions. Journal of Animal Ecology 75, 752–756.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gutiérrez, P.A. (2001) Monogenean community structure on the gills of Pimelodus albicans from Rio de la Plata (Argentina): a comparative approach. Parasitology 122, 465–470.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Holmes, J.C. & Price, P.W. (1986) Communities of parasites. pp. 187–213in Anderson, D.J. & Kikkawa, J. (Eds) Community ecology: pattern and process. Oxford, Blackwell Scientific.Google Scholar
Hubbell, S.P. (2001) The unified neutral theory of biodiversity and biogeography. Princeton, Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Legendre, P. & Legendre, L. (1998) Numerical ecology. 2nd edn. Amsterdam, Elsevier.Google Scholar
Loehle, C. (2006) Species abundance distributions result from body size—energetics relationships. Ecology 87, 2221–2226.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
MacArthur, R.H. (1957) On the relative abundance of bird species. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA 43, 293–295.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Mandelbrot, B. (1977) Fractals, from chance and dimension. New York, Freeman.Google Scholar
Mandelbrot, B. (1982) The fractal geometry of nature. New York, Freeman.Google Scholar
Marquet, P.A., Navarette, S.A. & Castilla, J.C. (1990) Scaling population density to body size in rocky intertidal communities. Science 250, 1125–1127.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
May, R.M. (1975) Patterns of species abundance and diversity. pp. 81–120in Cody, M.L. & Diamond, J.M. (Eds) Ecology and evolution of communities. Cambridge, MA, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
McGill, B.J., Etienne, R.S., Gray, J.S., Alonso, D., Anderson, M.J., Benecha, H.K., Dornelas, M., Enquist, B.J., Green, J.L., He, F., Hurlbert, A.H., Magurran, A.E., Marquet, P.A., Maurer, B.A., Ostling, A., Soykan, C.U., Ugland, K.I. & White, E.P. (2007) Species abundance distributions: moving beyond single prediction theories to integration within an ecological framework. Ecology Letters 10, 995–1015.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Menezes, N.A. & Figueiredo, J.L. (1980) Manual de peixes marinhos do sudeste de Brasil IV. Teleostei (3). São Paulo, Museu de Zoologia, Universidade de São Paulo.Google Scholar
Menezes, N.A. & Figueiredo, J.L. (1985) Manual de peixes marinhos do sudeste de Brasil V. Teleostei (4). São Paulo, Museu de Zoologia, Universidade de São Paulo.Google Scholar
Motomura, I. (1947) Further notes on the law of geometrical progression of the population density in animal association. Physiological Ecology 1, 55–60.Google Scholar
Mouillot, D., Leprêtre, A., Andrei-Ruiz, M.C. & Viale, D. (2000) The fractal model: a new model to describe the species accumulation process and relative abundance distribution (RAD). Oikos 90, 333–342.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Norton, J., Lewis, J.W. & Rollinson, D. (2003) Parasite infracommunity diversity in eels: a reflection of local component community diversity. Parasitology 127, 475–482.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Poulin, R. (1996) Patterns in the evenness of gastrointestinal helminth communities. International Journal for Parasitology 26, 181–186.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Poulin, R. (1999) Body size vs abundance among parasite species: positive relationships? Ecography 22, 246–250.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Poulin, R. (2001) Interactions between species and the structure of helminth communities. Parasitology 122, S3–S11.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Poulin, R. (2004) Parasites and the neutral theory of biodiversity. Ecography 27, 119–123.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Poulin, R. (2007) Evolutionary ecology of parasites. 2nd edn. Princeton, Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Poulin, R. & Justine, J.-L. (2008) Linking species abundance distributions and body size in monogenean communities. Parasitology Research (in press).CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Poulin, R. & Luque, J.L. (2003) A general test of the interactive–isolationist continuum in gastrointestinal parasite communities of fish. International Journal for Parasitology 33, 1623–1630.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Preston, F.W. (1948) The commonness and rarity of species. Ecology 29, 254–283.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Salgado-Maldonado, G. & Kennedy, C.R. (1997) Richness and similarity of helminth communities in the tropical cichlid fish Cichlasoma urophthalmus from the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico. Parasitology 114, 581–590.Google Scholar
Schabuss, M., Kennedy, C.R., Konecny, R., Grillitsch, B., Schiemer, F. & Herzig, A. (2005) Long-term investigation of the composition and richness of intestinal helminth communities in the stocked population of eel, Anguilla anguilla, in Neusiedler See, Austria. Parasitology 130, 185–194.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Sousa, W.P. (1994) Patterns and processes in communities of helminth parasites. Trends in Ecology and Evolution 9, 52–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sugihara, G. (1980) Minimal community structure: an explanation of species abundance patterns. American Naturalist 116, 770–787.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Sures, B. & Streit, B. (2001) Eel parasite diversity and intermediate host abundance in the River Rhine, Germany. Parasitology 123, 185–191.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Tokeshi, M. (1993) Species abundance patterns and community structure. Advances in Ecological Research 24, 111–186.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tokeshi, M. (1999) Species coexistence: ecological and evolutionary perspectives. Oxford, Blackwell Science.Google Scholar
Whittaker, R.H. (1965) Dominance and diversity in land plant communities. Science 147, 250–260.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Wilson, J.B. (1991) Methods for fitting dominance/diversity curves. Journal of Vegetation Science 2, 35–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wilson, J.B. & Gitay, S.H. (1995) Community structure and assembly rules in a dune slack: variance in richness, guild proportionality, biomass constancy and dominance/diversity relations. Vegetatio 116, 93–106.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zar, J.H. (1999) Biostatistical analysis. 4th edn. New Jersey, Prentice-Hall.Google Scholar
Zipf, G.K. (1965) Human behavior and principle of least effort. New York, Addison-Wesley.Google Scholar