Trends in Parasitology
UpdateResearch FocusIncluding parasites in food webs
Section snippets
The case for the inclusion of parasites
Here's an interesting thought experiment: which activity did more to propel humans to the top of all natural food webs, the removal or extinction of top predators through direct hunting and habitat modification or the advent of the cooking of meat for human consumption? Conventional wisdom would indicate the removal of predators is of utmost importance. However, Lafferty et al. [1] would probably contend that by eliminating food-borne parasites, cooking meat was equally influential and has been
Does parasite inclusion change food-web dynamics?
It seems well accepted that parasites change descriptive parameters, such as connectance, looping and linkage density, of food webs 6, 11, 16. However, from a broader perspective, the more challenging yet important question might be to address whether incorporating parasites changes emergent properties and dynamics of food webs such as energy flow, stability and mass balance. Several theoretical studies have indicated such properties might be altered once parasites are incorporated in food
What does adding parasites entail? What are the obstacles?
Given the increasing evidence for parasite abundance in systems and thus their warranted inclusion in food webs, what are the ramifications for web construction, analysis and interpretation? Recently, there has been a trend to add more realism to food webs – including cannibalism, ominivory and intraguild predation and now, parasites. However, although such realism is beneficial for thorough understanding of systems, the cost of all these additions is increasing complexity. However, there are
Concluding remarks
Lafferty et al. [1] and a few previous related studies 6, 7, 10, 11 collectively make a strong case that incorporating parasites into food webs should be standard procedure in the future. Determining when parasite inclusion is prudent must surely depend on the questions being asked, but given the ubiquitous effects of parasites, surely one omits them at his or her peril. However, how we go about inclusion is hard to say because we are in the early stages of wholesale incorporation, and the
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