Parasites as indicators of biodiversity and habitat complexity in coastal ecosystems

Abstract

Researchers often use surrogate species for assessing biodiversity—organisms that can indicate the presence of additional taxa or provide insight into environmental processes. As indicators of anthropogenic impact, “cross-taxon” surrogates are theorized to be effective shortcuts for determining how communities respond to environmental change. However, few studies have implemented cross-taxon surrogates given the challenge of validating the strength of the relationship between surrogates and their target taxa. Trophically transmitted parasites require multiple invertebrate and vertebrate taxa to complete their life cycles (e.g., annelids, mollusks, fishes, shorebirds), making them ideal cross-taxon surrogates of community diversity. By sampling for these parasite surrogates, it is theoretically possible to infer the composition of the overall host community based on the species of parasites present. In our study, we tested the use of parasites as cross-taxon surrogates of biodiversity by sampling for digenetic trematodes in the mudsnail Ilyanassa obsoleta, collected from coastal shoreline environments with or without artificial structures (e.g., bulkheads, seawalls). We found that trematode richness, evenness, and diversity were all greater in snails sampled from natural shorelines versus those with artificial structures. While parasite communities clustered by shoreline type (with vs. without artificial structures), we found no differences in multivariate dispersion, or beta-diversity, between groups in our system. At the species level, trematodes requiring polychaetes and estuarine fishes as downstream hosts dominated parasite communities at shorelines with artificial structures. These taxa are ubiquitous but more abundant in degraded environments. In contrast, trematode species requiring mollusks and shorebirds as hosts was only documented from shorelines without artificial structures (i.e., natural), which may indicate that these areas are less degraded and have greater overall host diversity. High parasite diversity in easily collected hosts (e.g., mudsnails) provides evidence that the secondary (polychaetes, crustaceans) and tertiary (fishes, shorebirds) hosts required by the parasites are present in the system. Our study also helps validate the concept of surrogate species by demonstrating how a single species can represent broader taxonomic groups.