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Collecting Marine Gnathiid Isopod Fish Parasites with Light Traps
Published on: September 25, 2023
Fish parasites resolve the paradox of missing coextinctions
Giovanni Strona1, Paolo Galli, Simone Fattorini
1Department of Biotechnology and Biosciences, University of Milano Bicocca, Milano, Italy. giovanni.strona@unimib.it
Abstract:
Models of coextinction identify parasites as one of the most menaced ecological groups. The number of host species a parasite uses should strongly affect its risk of coextinction. The naïve expectation is that the lower the number, the higher is the parasite's risk of being left with no hosts. Here we analyse the coextinction risk of 12,141 fish parasite species and find that highly specific parasites are not the most endangered, because they tend to use hosts with low vulnerability to extinction. This unexpected result may explain why the number of documented host-parasite coextinctions is much lower than predicted by theoretical studies.
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