Different methods, different results: temporal trends in the study of nested subset patterns in parasite communities

@article{Timi2007DifferentMD,
  title={Different methods, different results: temporal trends in the study of nested subset patterns in parasite communities},
  author={Juan T. Timi and Robert Poulin},
  journal={Parasitology},
  year={2007},
  volume={135},
  pages={131 - 138}
}
SUMMARY The search for nested subset patterns has become a powerful tool for understanding the processes shaping parasite communities. Here, we re-examine the results of past studies on nestedness in parasite communities, to assess how sensitive they are to the analytical method used. Using the metric N and the null model RANDOM1, the first method available to study nested patterns, early studies concluded that nestedness was infrequent in parasite communities. In contrast later studies, using… 
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Nestedness in assemblages of helminth parasites of bats: a function of geography, environment, or host nestedness?
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Evaluating both spatial and temporal patterns of nestedness in the insular floras of four archipelagoes of small islands in the bahamas and the potential underlying environmental gradients suggested extinction is an important mechanism in producing nestedness.
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TLDR
Seriated successional pattern was evident for parasite communities of long-lived marine fish, indicating that parasite communities follow sequential changes over time, like many free-living communities.
Is the nestedness of metazoan parasite assemblages of marine fishes from the southeastern Pacific coast a pattern associated with the geographical distributional range of the host?
TLDR
The occurrence of parasites in 9 fish species widely distributed along the southeastern Pacific coast was recorded to determine whether the ecto- and endoparasite assemblages of marine fishes show a nested structure associated with host distributional range.
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TLDR
It is concluded that flea and mite assemblages across host populations at smaller and larger spatial scales and at temporal scale were characterized by nestedness which, in turn, contributed to an important degree to the total amount of β-diversity of these assemblage.
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TLDR
Results suggest that there is a high degree of resiliency and environmental dependence to the worm communities of buffalo and both deterministic and stochastic processes may play a role in the assembly of parasite communities of wild hosts, but their relative importance may vary temporally.
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TLDR
There is no convincing evidence that fish parasite populations are stable and regulated since in all cases alternative explanations are equally acceptable and it appears that they are non-equilibrial systems, rather than structured and organized.
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TLDR
This research showed that most antagonistic networks do not display power law degree distributions and that resource species are generally uniformly distributed, and clearly showed that the conclusion of whether a network is significantly compartmentalized or nested depends largely on the null model used.
Nestedness and Modularity in Bipartite Networks
TLDR
It is shown how bipartite networks can be an effective tool for linking data and theory in community ecology, though use of a coevolutionary model of virus-bacteria interactions and that quantitative modular structures differ from traditional binary modular structures with implications for how modularity is reported and used.
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