Piot Niels, Smagghe Guy, Meeus Ivan
Laboratory of Agrozoology, Department of Plants and Crops, Faculty of Bioscience Engineering, Ghent University Coupure Links 653, 9000 Ghent, Belgium.
Insects. 2020 Dec 8;11(12):872. doi: 10.3390/insects11120872.
Parasites are important actors within ecosystems. However, a key aspect to unraveling parasite epidemiology is understanding transmission. The bee pollinator community harbors several multihost parasites, which have been shown to be able to spread between species via flowers. Hence the plant-pollinator network can provide valuable information on the transmission of these parasites between species. Although several controlled experiments have shown that flowers function as a transmission hub for parasites, the link with the plant-pollinator network has rarely been addressed in the field. Here, one can hypothesize that the most central flowers in the network are more likely to enable parasite transmission between species. In this study, we test this hypothesis in three local plant-pollinator networks and show that the centrality of a plant in a weighted plant-pollinator network is a good predictor of the presence of multihost pollinator parasites on the plant's flowers.
寄生虫是生态系统中的重要角色。然而，解析寄生虫流行病学的一个关键方面是了解传播过程。蜜蜂传粉者群落中有几种多宿主寄生虫，已证明它们能够通过花朵在物种间传播。因此，植物-传粉者网络可以提供有关这些寄生虫在物种间传播的有价值信息。尽管一些对照实验表明花朵是寄生虫的传播枢纽，但在野外很少探讨其与植物-传粉者网络的联系。在此，可以假设网络中最核心的花朵更有可能促成寄生虫在物种间的传播。在本研究中，我们在三个当地植物-传粉者网络中检验了这一假设，结果表明，在加权植物-传粉者网络中，植物的中心性是该植物花朵上存在多宿主传粉者寄生虫的良好预测指标。
