Parasite richness and network architecture jointly affect multihost community composition

Abstract

Broad evidence has shown that network structure can play an important role in food-web persistence, but little is known on how the structure of parasitic links affects the multihost community. Following a previous model of parasitic infection in host food-web, we have explored the effects of parasite richness and architecture of parasitic links on species persistence and topological properties within the merged network including predatory and parasitic sub-webs. Results have shown that the effect of parasitic links on community structure depends on both the level of parasite richness and network architecture. Particularly for architecture network generated by inverse niche model, the standard deviation of vulnerability with low connectance of parasitic links amazingly reaches a hollow at moderate parasite richness, but high for the extreme richness (weak or strong). Although network architecture can strongly affect topological properties of multihost community, it can only weakly influence the ability of species to coexist. The results emphasize that addition of parasites in the ecosystem could be an important process for species diversity and topological structure of ecological network.