Host biological factors and geographic locality influence predictors of parasite communities in sympatric sparid fishes off the southern Italian coast

Mario Santoro,Bruno Bellisario,Doriana Iaccarino

doi:10.1038/s41598-020-69628-1

Mario Santoro, Bruno Bellisario + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-69628-1

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Abstract

Host biological factors and habitat influence the faunal assemblages and biodiversity worldwide, including parasite communities of vertebrate and invertebrate hosts. The ecological relationship between hosts and parasites can be mediated by interaction of host’s biological factors, as their physiological condition, diet and size, with the environmental components, somehow influencing the features of parasite infection in host populations. Here, we used boosted regression tree models to study the parasite communities of two sympatric sparid fishes, the salema Sarpa salpa and the white seabream Diplodus sargus, to investigate the role of specific host’s traits in two contiguous coastal areas along the southern-western Tyrrhenian coast of Italy characterized by different degree of deterioration. Results showed that overall and across all parasite groups (ecto-, endo- and ecto- plus endo-parasites), sampling localities were the most important predictors of abundance, species richness, and diversity for salema. Moreover, seasonality was the main predictor of endo-parasite abundance, while size-related factors explained most of the variation in species richness and diversity. In the white seabream, size-related factors and reproductive cycle-related factors were the most important predictors for the overall parasite abundance and parasite richness, respectively. Our findings suggest that the parasite community of salema and white seabream responded differently to specific biological factors, highlighting how the environmental conditions under which they live may exert a strong influence on the parasite communities of each host fish.

Highlights

Host biological factors and habitat influence the faunal assemblages and biodiversity worldwide, including parasite communities of vertebrate and invertebrate hosts
Our results show that biological factors and geographic locality affect the parasite community of the two fishes, supporting the idea that the deterioration of ecosystems may play an important role on fish hosts that, in turn, could be used as biological indicators
We used boosted regression tree models (BRTm) to assess the influence of host biological factors, timing and sampling areas on parasites abundance, species richness, and diversity, measured by Shannon and Simpson indices[23]

Summary

Introduction

Host biological factors and habitat influence the faunal assemblages and biodiversity worldwide, including parasite communities of vertebrate and invertebrate hosts. We used boosted regression tree models to study the parasite communities of two sympatric sparid fishes, the salema Sarpa salpa and the white seabream Diplodus sargus, to investigate the role of specific host’s traits in two contiguous coastal areas along the southern-western Tyrrhenian coast of Italy characterized by different degree of deterioration. The salema Sarpa salpa and the white seabream Diplodus sargus (Sparidae) are demersal and sympatric species that inhabit coastal rocky reef areas and Posidonia oceanica meadows. Both species are among the most common and abundant sparid fishes in shallow waters of the Mediterranean Sea, so that they could be used as sentinels of environment stability. No study has been conducted on the whole metazoan parasite community of salema and white seabream from the Tyrrhenian Sea or in other sparid fishes from off southern Italian coast

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