Parasitic worms: how many really?

Abstract

Accumulation curves are useful tools to estimate species diversity. Here we argue that they can also be used in the study of global parasite species richness. Although this basic idea is not completely new, our approach differs from the previous ones as it treats each host species as an independent sample. We show that randomly resampling host-parasite records from the existing databases makes it possible to empirically model the relationship between the number of investigated host species, and the corresponding number of parasite species retrieved from those hosts. This method was tested on 21 inclusive lists of parasitic worms occurring on vertebrate hosts. All of the obtained models conform well to a power law curve. These curves were then used to estimate global parasite species richness. Results obtained with the new method suggest that current predictions are likely to severely overestimate parasite diversity.

Keywords: Accumulation curve; Biodiversity; Helminth; Host range; Power law; Rarefaction curve.