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Ecological Fitting As A Determinant Of The Community Structure Of Platyhelminth Parasites Of Anurans, Daniel R. Brooks, Virginia León-Règagnon, Deborah A. Mclennan, Derek Zelmer

Harold W. Manter Laboratory of Parasitology: Faculty and Staff Publications

Host-parasite associations are assumed to be ecologically specialized, tightly coevolved systems driven by mutual modification in which host switching is a rare phenomenon. Ecological fitting, however, increases the probability of host switching, creating incongruences between host and parasite phylogenies, when (1) specialization on a particular host resource is a shared characteristic of distantly related parasites, and (2) the resource being tracked by the parasite is widespread among many host species. We investigated the effect of ecological fitting on structuring the platyhelminth communities of anurans from a temperate forest and grassland in the United States and tropical dry and wet forests …