Decay of parasite community similarity with host phylogenetic and geographic distances among deep-sea fish (grenadiers)

Although parasite community studies are growing in numbers, our understanding of which macro-ecological and evolutionary processes have shaped parasite communities is still based on a narrow range of host–parasite systems. The present study assessed the diversity and endoparasite species composition in New Zealand deep-sea fish (grenadiers, family Macrouridae), and tested the effects of host phylogeny and geography on the structure of endoparasite communities using a distance decay framework. We found that grenadiers from the Chatham Rise harboured a surprisingly high diversity of digeneans, cestodes and nematodes, with different species of grenadiers having different parasite assemblages. Our results demonstrate that community similarity based on the presence/absence of parasites was only affected by the phylogenetic relatedness among grenadier species. In contrast, both phylogenetic distance among grenadiers (measured as the number of base-pair differences of DNA sequences) and geographic distance between sample locations influenced the similarity of parasite communities based on the parasites' prevalence and mean abundance. Our key findings highlight the significant effect of deep-sea host phylogeny in shaping their parasite assemblages, a factor previously neglected in studies of parasite communities in deep-sea systems.