A herring in the North Sea, a crab in the Wadden Sea or an anemone fish on a coral reef… biologists like to think in terms of individual species that all have their own place within food webs in ecosystems across the world. 'But that is surely too simplistic thinking,' NIOZ researcher Ana Born-Torrijos and colleagues warn in this month's cover story of the journal Trends in Parasitology.
that live in and on an animal, you might draw very wrong conclusions about its ecology," Born-Torrijos said."Wild-caught animals should not be considered single individuals, but rather as entire ecosystems by themselves, hosting a variety of microbes and parasites which can be found in virtually every tissue."
In the review article, the researchers describe how an animal's stable isotope values may differ depending on whether they are infected with parasites or not."That's because parasites can change the behavior of a host, even without making that host really sick. For example, a coral fish infected by a specific species of isopod, appears to forage much less outside the reef than uninfected individuals of the same species.
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