Department of Integrative Biology, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas, 78712, USA.
Office of Institutional Research, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, Michigan, 49008-5253, USA.
Ecology. 2020 Dec;101(12):e03181. doi: 10.1002/ecy.3181. Epub 2020 Oct 1.
A core goal of ecology is to understand the abiotic and biotic variables that regulate species distributions and community composition. A major obstacle is that the rules governing species distributions can change with spatial scale. Here, we illustrate this point using data from a spatially nested metacommunity of parasites infecting a metapopulation of threespine stickleback fish from 34 lakes on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. Like most parasite metacommunities, the composition of stickleback parasites differs among host individuals within each host population, and differs between host populations. The distribution of each parasite taxon depends, to varying degrees, on individual host traits (e.g., mass, diet) and on host-population characteristics (e.g., lake size, mean host mass, mean diet). However, in most cases in this data set, a given parasite was regulated by different factors at the host-individual and host-population scales, leading to scale-dependent patterns of parasite-species co-occurrence.
生态学的核心目标是理解调节物种分布和群落组成的非生物和生物变量。一个主要的障碍是，支配物种分布的规则随着空间尺度的变化而变化。在这里，我们使用来自不列颠哥伦比亚省温哥华岛 34 个湖泊的刺鱼寄生后生动物的嵌套集合群的数据来说明这一点。与大多数寄生虫集合群一样，刺鱼寄生虫的组成在每个宿主种群内的宿主个体之间不同，并且在宿主种群之间也不同。每个寄生虫分类单元的分布在不同程度上取决于个体宿主特征（例如，质量，饮食）和宿主种群特征（例如，湖泊大小，平均宿主质量，平均饮食）。但是，在该数据集的大多数情况下，给定的寄生虫在宿主个体和宿主种群尺度上受到不同因素的调节，导致寄生虫物种共现的尺度依赖性模式。
