Cross-continental comparison of parasite communities in a wide-ranging carnivore suggests associations with prey diversity and host density
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Parasites are integral to ecosystem functioning yet often overlooked. Improved understanding of host-parasite associations is important, particularly for wide-ranging species for which host range shifts and climate change could alter host-parasite interactions and their effects on ecosystem function. Among the most widely distributed mammals with diverse diets, grey wolves (Canis lupus) host parasites that are transmitted among canids and via prey species. Grey wolf-parasite associations may therefore influence the population dynamics and ecological functions of both wolves and their prey. Our goal was to identify large-scale processes that shape host-parasite interactions across populations, with the grey wolf as a model organism. By compiling data from various studies, we examined the faecal prevalence of gastrointestinal parasites in six wolf populations from two continents in relation to wolf density, diet diversity, and other ecological conditions. As expected, we found that the faecal prevalence of parasites transmitted directly to wolves via contact with other canids or their excreta was positively associated with wolf density. Contrary to our expectations, the faecal prevalence of parasites transmitted via prey was negatively associated with prey diversity. We also found that parasite communities reflected landscape characteristics and specific prey items available to wolves. Several parasite taxa identified in this study, including hookworms and coccidian protozoans, can cause morbidity and mortality in canids, especially in pups, or in combination with other stressors. The density-prevalence relationship for parasites with simple lifecycles may reflect a regulatory role of gastrointestinal parasites on wolf populations. Our result that faecal prevalence of parasites was lower in wolves with more diverse diets could provide insight into the mechanisms by which biodiversity may regulate disease. A diverse suite of predator-prey interactions could regulate the effects of parasitism on prey populations and mitigate the transmission of infectious agents, including zoonoses, spread via trophic interactions.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".