Helminth metacommunity of small mammals in a Brazilian reserve: the contribution of environmental variables, host attributes and spatial variables in parasite species abundance

T S Cardoso,A Maldonado,J L Luque,S F Costa-Neto,R Gentile,R O Simões,M Weksler,C Braga

doi:10.1007/s42974-020-00016-5

T S Cardoso, A Maldonado + Show 6 more

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https://doi.org/10.1007/s42974-020-00016-5

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Abstract

The role of environmental factors and landscape heterogeneity on species distribution on different spatial scales is one of the most important questions in community ecology. Variations in the environmental gradient characteristics, host attributes and spatial scales may influence the parasites distribution. The helminth metacommunity of 12 small mammal species was investigated in an Atlantic Forest reserve located in the State of Rio de Janeiro, southeast Brazil. We evaluated the influence of environmental variables, host attributes and spatial factors on the helminth metacommunity of small mammals, considering infracommunity and component community levels. Twenty-nine helminth morphospecies were recovered. The host attributes and spatial variables influenced the abundance of helminth species in the metacommunities for rodents and marsupials together, and for rodents alone at the infracommunity level. Host body mass, host diet and spatial variables at broad spatial scale (among localities) were the most important variables to explain the variation in helminth abundance. Parasite species richness influenced this variation only for the marsupial helminth metacommunity at the infracommunity level. The metacommunity showed larger turnover (parasite replacement) than nestedness (parasite loss) for their helminth species at both infracommunity and component community levels, which is associated with a high host specificity, and low helminth sharing among hosts for most species, resulting in a structured metacommunity.

Highlights

One of the greatest interests in community ecology is to understand how environmental factors and landscape heterogeneity can contribute to the species distribution in local communities considering different spatial scales (Peres-Neto and Legendre 2010)
We investigated the relative importance of environmental variables, host attributes and spatial variables on the variation in species abundance for the metacommunities analyzed
Didelphis aurita was infected by three helminth phyla (Table 1) and had the highest values of prevalence and/or abundance of Aspidodera raillieti Travassos, 1913, Cruzia tentaculata (Rudolphi 1819) Travassos (1922), Heterostrongylus heterostrongylus Travassos, 1925, Turgida turgida (Rudolphi 1819) Travassos, 1919 and Viannaia hamata Travassos, 1914

Summary

Introduction

One of the greatest interests in community ecology is to understand how environmental factors and landscape heterogeneity can contribute to the species distribution in local communities considering different spatial scales (Peres-Neto and Legendre 2010). In this case, parasites may present nonrandom patterns of distribution in their hosts due to environmental factors. The set of infracommunities or component communities, in turn, forms a metacommunity In this case, environmental and spatial predictors, as well as factors related to the hosts themselves, can be determinant for the degree of similarity in the composition and abundance of parasite species among the communities that form a metacommunity (Dallas and Presley 2014; Heino et al 2017). The metacommunity theory has emerged only in the last two decades, it has been applied in studies of host–parasite interaction of different taxa (Richgels et al 2013; Nieto-Rabiela et al 2018; Costa et al 2019)

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