Structure of parasite communities in urban environments: the case of helminths in synanthropic rodents

HANCKE, DIEGO; SUAREZ, OLGA

FOLIA PARASITOLOGICA

FOLIA PARASITOLOGICA

Año: 2018

0015-5683

Identifying patterns with sufficient predictive power is a constant challenge for ecologists to address ecological problems related to species conservation, pollution or infectious disease control. During the last years, the amounts of parasitological studies in this sense increased, but in urban environments they are still scarce. The main aim of this paper was to investigate if helminth communities of urban rodents were structured within host assembly (compound community) or are a result of random events occurring at each individual host scale (infracommunity). A total of 203 rodents belonging to 4 species (Rattus rattus, R. norvegicus, Mus musculus and the native Oligoryzomys flavescens) and captured in 3 different landscape units of the City of Buenos Aires (industrial-residential neighbourhoods, shantytowns and parklands) were analyzed. The results showed that infracommunities could be grouped according to composition and relative abundances and that they respond to the structure of the host community. Thus, the component communities defined in this study could be identified as subsets of the compound community (rodent assemblage) and infracommunities (each host) as random samples within each one. Quantitative differences among component communities were denoted by comparing the infection levels of helminths described as central species. Therefore, infracommunities of R. norvegicus and O. flavescens were the most predictable because of the high abundance of Heterakis spumosa and Nippostrongylus brasiliensis, and Stilestrogylus flavescens respectively. Several mechanisms contribute to complexity of the structure of parasite communities, where specific parasites itself, definitive and intermediate hosts and environmental and anthropogenic factors all play a role in the dynamics of the compound community.