10.25349/D9Z89D
Morton, Dana
0000-0002-5936-666X
University of California, Santa Barbara
Lafferty, Kevin
U.S. Geological Survey, Western Ecological Research Center
Parasites in kelp-forest food webs increase food-chain length, complexity,
and specialization, but reduce connectance
Dryad
dataset
2021
Parasites
kelp forest
Marine Sciences
2021-11-23T00:00:00Z
2021-11-23T00:00:00Z
en
https://doi.org/10.1002/aaa.1234
1257762 bytes
3
CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication
We explored whether parasites are important in kelp forests by examining
their effects on a high-quality, high-resolution kelp-forest food web.
After controlling for generic effects of network size, parasites affected
kelp-forest food web structure in some ways consistent with other systems.
Parasites increased the trophic span of web, increasing top predator
vulnerability and the longest chain length. Unique links associated with
parasites, such as concomitant predation (consumption of parasites along
with their hosts by predators) increased the frequency of network motifs
involving mutual consumption and decreased niche contiguity of free-living
species. However, parasites also affected kelp-forest food web structure
in ways not seen in other systems. Kelp-forest parasites are richer and
more specialized than other systems. As a result, parasites reduced diet
generality and decreased connectance in the kelp forest. Although mutual
consumption motifs increased in frequency, this motif type was still a
small fraction of all possible motifs, so their increase in frequency was
not enough to compensate for the decrease in connectance caused by adding
many specialist parasite species.
Please refer to the associated manuscript.