Taxonomic scale and community organization impact observed latitudinal gradients of parasite diversity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Aim While most free‐living taxa follow the latitudinal diversity gradient (LDG), or the trend of higher diversity at lower latitudes, we know little about how the diversity of parasitic taxa is distributed across latitudes. To better understand the macroecological patterns of parasite diversity, we sought to determine whether (1) helminths follow the traditional LDG; (2) taxonomic resolution impacts observed patterns; (3) latitudinal patterns are consistent across levels of community organization and (4) helminth diversity is correlated with climate‐ and host‐associated variables. Location San Juan de Peñas Blancas, Costa Rica; Calnali, Hidalgo, Mexico; College Station, Texas, USA; Brownsville, Nebraska, USA; Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada; Churchill, Manitoba, Canada Taxon Rodentia: Cricetidae; Nematoda; Platyhelminthes Methods We sampled parasites from hosts at field sites set approximately every 10° in latitude. We evaluated the relationships between parasite species richness (of all helminths as well as nematodes, cestodes and trematodes separately) and latitude, climate, and host mass at two levels of parasite community organization, the infracommunity and the component community, using generalized additive models. Results Total helminth richness was significantly correlated with latitude, but the relationship was nonlinear. Nematode, cestode and trematode diversity were also significantly correlated with latitude, but the relationship differed between the levels of community organization and among the taxonomic groups. Climate‐ and host‐associated variables were significantly correlated with different parasite taxa, although the strength and size of the correlations varied among the groups. Main conclusions There are complex associations between parasite richness and latitude, climate, and host traits, and community organization and taxonomic grouping affected the observed relationships. Climate has been implicated as an important factor in shaping LDG patterns and may similarly influence helminth diversity patterns. Overall, this work provides further support and exceptions to the LDG and stresses the importance of considering scale in ecological investigations.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".