Host age predicts parasite occurrence, richness, and nested infracommunities in a pilot whale-helminth network
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IMMUNOLOGY AND HOST-PARASITE INTERACTIONS - ORIGINAL PAPER
Host age predicts parasite occurrence, richness, and nested infracommunities in a pilot whale-helminth network Sybelle Bellay 1,2 & Fabrício Hiroiuki Oda 1,3 & Mário Almeida-Neto 4 Ricardo Massato Takemoto 1,2 & Juan Antonio Balbuena 6
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Edson Fontes de Oliveira 5
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Received: 29 November 2019 / Accepted: 10 May 2020 # Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Ecological data on marine mammal parasites represent an excellent opportunity to expand our understanding of host-parasite systems. In this study, we used a dataset of intestinal helminth parasites on 167 long-finned pilot whales Globicephala melas (Traill, 1809) from seven localities in the Faroe Islands to evaluate the extent to which the host’s age and sex influence the occurrence, richness, and nested pattern of helminth parasites and the importance of individual hosts to the helminth community. We found positive effects of age on both the occurrence and richness of helminths. Older host individuals showed an ordered accumulation of parasites, as evidenced by the nested pattern in their composition. Males had a higher occurrence of parasites than females, but the richness of helminths did not differ between sexes. Our findings suggest that differences in host-parasite interactions in long-finned pilot whales result mainly from age-structured variations in biological and behavioral characteristics. Keywords Globicephala melas . Host-parasite interactions . Marine mammals . North Atlantic Ocean parasites . Faroe Islands
Introduction Understanding and predicting how the composition and abundance of parasites vary among hosts is a central goal in parasite ecology. Parasite communities vary across spatial and ecological scales (Poulin 1997; Aznar et al. 2001; Penczykowski et al. 2016). It is well established that dissimilarity in parasite communities increases with phylogenetic distance and spatial isolation among hosts (Poulin 2003,
2009; Bellay et al. 2011; Pilosof et al. 2014). On the other hand, parasite composition can also vary widely even among sympatric conspecific hosts (Guégan and Hugueny 1994; Friesen et al. 2015; Watkins and Blouin-Demers 2019). Intrapopulational variation in host age and time of exposure to parasites (Izhar and Ben-Ami 2015), diet composition (Dailey and Vogelbein 1991; Lima et al. 2016), vagility and exposure to environmental characteristics (Dailey and Vogelbein 1991; Poulin 2003), social and sexual behaviors
Section Editor: Hiroshi Sato Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s00436-020-06716-1) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Sybelle Bellay [email protected] 1
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Departamento de Química Biológica, Programa de Pós-graduação em Bioprospecção Molecular, Universidade Regional do Cariri, Crato, Ceará, Brazil
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Departamento de Ecologia, Programa de Pós-Graduação em Ecologia e Evolução, Instituto de Ciências Biológicas, Universidade
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