Tracking year-to-year changes in intestinal nematode communities

Tuomas Aivelo,University of Helsinki

(@aivelo)

11.2.2015Oikos Finland

of rufous mouse lemurs

Why longitudinal surveys?

Host individual is a dynamic habitat How parasite communities change? Understanding interactions in

parasite communities

→ virulence, prevalence etc.→ resistance, tolerance

Succession in parasite communities

→ host developmet

Long-term studies are quite common, but...

Focus often on single species / taxons

Focus on component populations (= one parasite species in a host community)

Infrapopulations (= one parasite species in a single host) rarely studied Photo: St. Kilda Soay Sheep Project / Arpat Ozgul

Research questions

Is there consistent succession in infracommunities?

How component and infracommunities relate to each other?

Studying infracommunities

Mark-recapture of rufous mouse lemurs (Microcebus rufus)

3 years in Ranomafana National Park, in southeastern Madagascar

634 samples on 78 individual mouse lemurs

...but it's not easy n thousand species of

nematodes which look the same

No adult specimens Identification of operational

taxonomic units Nematode barcoding routinely

with 18S gene Pyrosequencing to isolate and

sequence whole samples (1-1000 larvae

2011vs.

2012

Putative species 1 and 2 quite stable

Highest diversity when the prevalence is the lowest

Putative species 1

Strongyloides

Putative species 2

Rhabditidae

Putative species 3

Strongylida

Putative species 4

Chromadorea

Putative species 5

Enterobius

Putative species 6

Panagrellus

Component communities

First catches rarely contain nematodes

Rare putative species ephemeral

There's also turnover in common putative species

Infracommunities

In nutshell

Component community quite stable, whereas pervasive variation in infracommunity

Role of transmission routes? Hibernation and parasites?

What next?

Looking at the microbiome interaction between macrobiota and microbiota