INVESTIGADORES
ROSSIN Maria Alejandra
congresos y reuniones científicas
Título:
Fish trophic level and the similarity of unspecific larval parasite assemblages.
Autor/es:
TIMI JUAN TOMÁS; ROSSIN M. ALEJANDRA; ALARCOS ANA JULIA; BRAICOVICH PAOLA; CANTATORE DELFINA MARIA; LANFRANCHI ANA LAURA
Lugar:
Melbourne
Reunión:
Congreso; XII International Congress for Parasitology.; 2010
Institución organizadora:
World Federation of Parasitologists
Resumen:
FISH TROPHIC LEVEL
AND THE SIMILARITY OF UNSPECIFIC
LARVAL PARASITE ASSEMBLAGES
J. T. Timi, M. A. Rossin, A. J. Alarcos, P. E. Braicovich, D. M.P.
Cantatore, A. L. Lanfranchi
Laboratorio de Parasitología, Depto. de Biología, Facultad de
Ciencias Exactas y, Universidad
Nacional de Mar del Plata-CONICET, Mar del Plata, Buenos Aires,
Argentina
Whereas the effect
of parasites on food webs is increasingly recognized and has been extensively
measured and modelled, the effect of food web on parasites has been not
quantified in a similar way. Here, we apply the concept of decay in community
similarity with increasing distance, previously used for parasites in geographical,
phylogenetic and ontogenetic contexts, to differences in the trophic level (TL)
of fishes. We propose an accurate quantitative method to measure rates of
community change as a function of host feeding habits and it is applied for the
first time across host species in marine waters. We focused on a suit of 15 species
of trophically-transmitted and unspecific larval helminths across 16 fish
species (1783 specimens, 6 orders, 14 families) with different size and TL,
gathered from the same region. It was assumed that the presence of these
parasites in a given fish species means that this is a suitable host. However
not all host species harboured the same number and type of parasites,
reflecting the differences in their ecological characteristics. We used
differences in TL and body length (a reliable surrogate of TL) as measurements
of size and trophic distances. It was found that similarity at both
infracommunity and component community levels showed a very clear decay pattern
based on values of abundance and relative abundance, with increasing distance
in TL, but not in fish size, leading TL to arise as the main explanatory factor
for similarity among parasite communities. Multivariate analyses also
discriminated fish species according their
TL and habitat.
Furthermore, the relationships between host TL and community similarity allowed
to identify those fishes for which the TL was apparently under- or
overestimated and also to predict the TL of host species based only parasite
data.