Desvendando a complexidade por trás das redes de interação antagônica envolvendo mamíferos e seus ectoparasitas

Abstract

The objective of this study is to use complex networks derivatives metrics to identify the organizational patterns and rates of specialization in the interactions between mammals and their ectoparasites. Moreover, we investigated how the taxonomic distance between mammals explains the distribution of their ectoparasites. We used a database of 251 mammal’s species and 629 species of ectoparasites from the entire Mexico. We found that the species richness of partness associated and with specialization was highly variable between mammals and ectoparasitic groups. Furthermore, the network ectoparasite-host displayed a modular pattern of interaction, with groups of ectoparasites that interact with specific groups of mammal’s species. That high specialization of interactions is related to the taxonomic distance between the host species (as a proxy of phylogeny), and mammals of the same genus have a probability of approximately 90% to share their ectoparasites. This probability declined exponentially in response to taxonomic distance. In general, our results showed an interactive network of ectoparasites mammals highly specialized, providing new subsidies to the study evolutionary processes in antagonist systems.