Campião Karla Magalhães, Delatorre Milena, Rodrigues Rozangela Batista, da Silva Reinaldo José, Ferreira Vanda Lúcia
Programa de Pós-Graduação em Ecologia e Conservação, Universidade Federal do Mato Grosso do Sul, Campo Grande, Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil.
J Parasitol. 2012 Apr;98(2):229-35. doi: 10.1645/GE-2877.1. Epub 2011 Nov 16.
Understanding the patterns of species distribution and abundance has been at the core of ecology. In general, these patterns are determined by species dispersion as well as by abiotic and biotic environmental conditions. Similarly, host-parasite relations and the structure of parasite assemblages are also shaped by environmental conditions and landscape composition. Herein, we assessed the influence of environmental variables and parasite species dispersion on the structure of helminth parasites communities in the frog Leptodactylus podicipinus. We sampled 10 ponds and recorded area, depth, altitude, pH, dissolved oxygen, salinity, temperature, and extent of soil, water, and vegetation cover as well as the distances between the ponds. We collected 121 frogs and found 9 helminth taxa; 2 of them were core species (prevalence higher than 50%), which contributed to the relatively high similarity observed among the ponds. Most of the helminths showed some variation in the frequencies of occurrence among communities from different ponds. The change in species composition among ponds was explained by the environmental variables but not by the distance between the ponds. Moreover, the results indicated that local processes (variation in environmental conditions) were more important than the regional processes (species distribution) in determining the structure of parasite communities. The variation in helminth communities among ponds in response to moderate differences in pond environmental characteristics points to the potential of helminth species as indicators of environmental conditions.
理解物种分布和丰度模式一直是生态学的核心内容。一般来说，这些模式由物种扩散以及非生物和生物环境条件决定。同样，宿主 - 寄生虫关系和寄生虫群落结构也受环境条件和景观组成的影响。在此，我们评估了环境变量和寄生虫物种扩散对蛙类长趾蛙（Leptodactylus podicipinus）体内蠕虫寄生虫群落结构的影响。我们对10个池塘进行了采样，并记录了面积、深度、海拔、pH值、溶解氧、盐度、温度、土壤、水和植被覆盖范围以及池塘之间的距离。我们收集了121只青蛙，发现了9个蠕虫分类单元；其中2个是核心物种（患病率高于50%），这导致了在不同池塘之间观察到相对较高的相似性。大多数蠕虫在不同池塘群落中的出现频率存在一些差异。池塘间物种组成的变化是由环境变量而非池塘间距离所解释的。此外，结果表明在决定寄生虫群落结构方面，局部过程（环境条件的变化）比区域过程（物种分布）更为重要。蠕虫群落因池塘环境特征的适度差异而在不同池塘间产生变化，这表明蠕虫物种具有作为环境条件指标的潜力。
