Publication Date:
2008-07-25
Description:
Parasites can have strong impacts but are thought to contribute little biomass to ecosystems. We quantified the biomass of free-living and parasitic species in three estuaries on the Pacific coast of California and Baja California. Here we show that parasites have substantial biomass in these ecosystems. We found that parasite biomass exceeded that of top predators. The biomass of trematodes was particularly high, being comparable to that of the abundant birds, fishes, burrowing shrimps and polychaetes. Trophically transmitted parasites and parasitic castrators subsumed more biomass than did other parasitic functional groups. The extended phenotype biomass controlled by parasitic castrators sometimes exceeded that of their uninfected hosts. The annual production of free-swimming trematode transmission stages was greater than the combined biomass of all quantified parasites and was also greater than bird biomass. This biomass and productivity of parasites implies a profound role for infectious processes in these estuaries.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Kuris, Armand M -- Hechinger, Ryan F -- Shaw, Jenny C -- Whitney, Kathleen L -- Aguirre-Macedo, Leopoldina -- Boch, Charlie A -- Dobson, Andrew P -- Dunham, Eleca J -- Fredensborg, Brian L -- Huspeni, Todd C -- Lorda, Julio -- Mababa, Luzviminda -- Mancini, Frank T -- Mora, Adrienne B -- Pickering, Maria -- Talhouk, Nadia L -- Torchin, Mark E -- Lafferty, Kevin D -- England -- Nature. 2008 Jul 24;454(7203):515-8. doi: 10.1038/nature06970.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉Department of Ecology, Evolution and Marine Biology and Marine Science Institute, University of California, Santa Barbara, California 93106, USA. kuris@lifesci.ucsb.edu〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18650923" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉
Keywords:
Animals
;
*Biomass
;
California
;
*Ecosystem
;
Host-Parasite Interactions
;
Pacific Ocean
;
Parasites/*isolation & purification/*physiology
;
Snails/parasitology
;
Trematoda/isolation & purification/physiology
;
Trematode Infections/parasitology
;
Wetlands
Print ISSN:
0028-0836
Electronic ISSN:
1476-4687
Topics:
Biology
,
Chemistry and Pharmacology
,
Medicine
,
Natural Sciences in General
,
Physics
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