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Community structure of digenean parasites of sparid and labrid fishes of the Mediterranean sea: a new approach

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 October 2009

P. SASAL
Affiliation:
Laboratoire de Biologie Animale, U.M.R. 5555, CNRS, Université de Perpignan, Avenue de Villeneuve, 66860 Perpignan Cedex, France University of Windsor, Department of Biological Sciences, Windsor, Ontario N9B 3P4, Canada
N. NIQUIL
Affiliation:
EPHE, Laboratoire de Biologie Marine et Malacologie, Université de Perpignan, Avenue de Villeneuve, 66860 Perpignan Cedex, France
P. BARTOLI
Affiliation:
Centre d'Océanologie de Marseille, U.M.R. 6540, CNRS Dimar, Campus Universitaire de Luminy, Case 901, 13288 Marseille Cedex 9, France
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Abstract

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The aim of this work was to study the structure of the parasite communities of Digeneans of 2 families of Teleost fishes (Sparidae and Labridae) of the Mediterranean sea. We tried to quantify the importance of both the microhabitat requirements of the parasite species and the effect of host biological factors on the parasite communities. We applied, for the first time in parasite community studies, the Canonical Correspondence Analysis (CCA) to analyse (i) the spatial distribution of parasite species within the digestive tract of the hosts; (ii) the host's biological factors (such as diet, host length, gregariousness and abundance) that may influence this spatial distribution of parasite species. Our results showed that potential microhabitats were vacant in the 2 host families studied revealing a lack of niche saturation because either there was little inter- and/or intraspecific competition or there were enough available space and resources within the host. Our results also indicated that the position of the parasite in the digestive tract is much more important than host biological factors for the structure of parasite community. Finally, we highlight the potential use of the CCA method for controlling for phylogenetic constraints in multi-species analyses.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
© 1999 Cambridge University Press