Fish-parasite interaction networks reveal latitudinal and taxonomic trends in the structure of host-parasite associations.

Abstract

In recent years, treating host–parasite associations as bipartite interaction networks has proven a powerful tool to identify structural patterns and their likely causes in communities of fish and their parasites. Network analysis allows for both community-level properties to be computed and investigated, and species-level roles to be determined. Here, using data from 31 host–parasite interaction networks from local fish communities around the world, we test for latitudinal trends at whole-network level, and taxonomic patterns at individual parasite species level. We found that while controlling for network size (number of species per network), network modularity, or the tendency for the network to be subdivided into groups of species that interact mostly with each other, decreased with increasing latitude. This suggests that tropical fish–parasite networks may be more stable than those from temperate regions in the event of community perturbations, such as species extinction. At the species level, after accounting for the effect of host specificity, we observed no difference in the centrality of parasite species within networks between parasites with different transmission modes. However, species in some taxa, namely branchiurans, acanthocephalans and larval trematodes, generally had higher centrality values than other parasite taxa. Because species with a central position often serve as module connectors, these 3 taxa may play a key role in whole-network cohesion. Our results highlight the usefulness of network analysis to reveal the aspects of fish–parasite community interactions that would otherwise remain hidden and advance our understanding of their evolution.