Parasites shape community structure and dynamics in freshwater crustaceans.

ABSTRACT: Parasites directly and indirectly influence the important interactions among hosts such as competition and predation through modifications of behaviour, reproduction and survival. Such impacts can affect local biodiversity, relative abundance of host species and structuring of communities and ecosystems. Despite having a firm theoretical basis for the potential effects of parasites on ecosystems, there is a scarcity of experimental data to validate these hypotheses, making our inferences about this topic more circumstantial. To quantitatively test parasites' role in structuring host communities, we set up a controlled, multigenerational mesocosm experiment involving four sympatric freshwater crustacean species that share up to four parasite species. Mesocosms were assigned to either of two

SUBMITTER: Friesen OC 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10317658 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature