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The parasite connection in ecosystems and macroevolution

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Abstract

In addition to their obvious negative effects (“pathogens”), endoparasites of various kinds play an important role in shaping and maintaining modern animal communities. In the long-term, parasites including pathogens are indispensable entities of any ecosystem. To understand this, it is essential that one changes the viewpoint from the host’s interests to that of the parasite. Together with geographic isolation, trophic arms race, symbiosis, and niche partitioning, all parasites (including balance strategists, i.e. seemingly non-pathogenic ones) modulate their hosts’ population densities. In addition, heteroxenic parasites control the balance between predator and prey species, particularly if final and intermediate hosts are vertebrates. Thereby, such parasites enhance the bonds in ecosystems and help maintain the status quo. As the links between eukaryotic parasites and their hosts are less flexible than trophic connections, parasite networks probably contributed to the observed stasis and incumbency of ecosystems over geologic time, in spite of continuous Darwinian innovation. Because heteroxenic parasites target taxonomic levels above that of the species (e.g. families), these taxa may have also become units of selection in global catastrophies. Macroevolutionary extrapolations, however, are difficult to verify because endoparasites cannot fossilize.

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Acknowledgements

This paper grew out of weekly meetings between the three “retired” authors in the Karolinenstift, Tuebingen, to which W.R. was confined for several years. We thank Christian Klug for letting us use his rendition of the ceratite evolution. Leo Hickey and Greg Dietl (Yale University) and two rounds of reviewers (T.J. Meehan, others anonymous) for critically reading an earlier version. Daniel Wenk digitalized the illustrations.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Engelfriedshalde 25, 72076, Tuebingen, Germany

    Adolf Seilacher

  2. Geology Department Yale University, POB 208109, New Heaven, CT, 06520, USA

    Adolf Seilacher

  3. Karolinenstift Pflegeheim, Melanchthonstr. 35, 72074, Tuebingen, Germany

    Wolf-Ernst Reif

  4. Falkenweg 69, 72076, Tuebingen, Germany

    Peter Wenk

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  1. Adolf Seilacher
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  2. Wolf-Ernst Reif
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Correspondence to Adolf Seilacher.

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Seilacher, A., Reif, WE. & Wenk, P. The parasite connection in ecosystems and macroevolution. Naturwissenschaften 94, 155–169 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00114-006-0164-4

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