Journal
JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL MARINE BIOLOGY AND ECOLOGY
Volume 494, Issue -, Pages 32-37Publisher
ELSEVIER
DOI: 10.1016/j.jembe.2017.05.004
Keywords
Air-exposure; Environmental heterogeneity; Host-parasite interactions; Oyster parasites; Spatial variation
Categories
Funding
- [NSF-OCE-0961853]
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Risk of infection by parasites can be driven by environmental heterogeneity, often at small scales. We quantified the effect of tidal elevation on infection patterns of two lethal parasites, Perkinsus marinus and Haplosporidium nelsoni, in an important coastal species, the eastern oyster, Crassostrea virginica. Within the southeastern US, oysters in Georgia and South Carolina are rarely found in the subtidal zone. Historically, it has been hypothesized that this pattern could be due to the increased exposure of hosts to waterborne parasites. We manipulated oysters at two tidal elevations (intertidal and subtidal) in a Georgia estuary to test if P. marinus, H. nelsoni, and co-infection by both parasites were different between tidal heights. We found that though P. marinus prevalence and co-infection prevalence of both parasites were not significantly different between tidal elevations, as has been found previously, P. marinus intensity and H. nelsoni prevalence were significantly higher intertidally than subtidally. These findings show that parasite infections can be higher in the host's natural (preferred) tidal height, and suggest that longer exposure to parasites in the subtidal is not a likely reason for the paucity of oysters at that tidal elevation in certain regions of the southeastern US. More broadly, our results provide further evidence that environmental effects on host-parasite interactions can vary by parasite species and across small (meter-long) spatial scales.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available