Helmintos parasitas do lagarto exótico hemidactylus mabouia (moreau de jonnès, 1818) (squamata, gekkonidae): padrões de infecção e efeito da distância geográfica na similaridade das comunidades

Abstract

Biological communities can vary spatially according to a relationship of decay of similarity with increasing distance between them. Although parasites represent good models for studies about richness and structure of biological communities, studies about ecological dynamics of parasite populations and communities are still scarce. Our objective in this work was to report the helminth communities associated to different populations of the lizard Hemidactylus mabouia (Moreau de Jonnès, 1818) in Northeast Brazil, to investigate the host-parasite relationships regarding infection patterns and to test if the similarity among parasite communities decreased as distance increased. For this, we collected H. mabouia population samples from the Northeast coast of Brazil, identified their parasite component communities and related the infection patterns to host features. We also tested the distance decay similarity relationship. The parasite richness varies among H. mabouia populations, but the infection patterns of the common parasite species are similar. The parasite species number, intensity and prevalence increase with host size, and may be the result of infection events accumulation with time. Males and females do not differ concerning infection intensity and prevalence, and this may be the result of intersexual diet similarity. Parasitism may or may not lead to a decrease in reproductive investment in females H. mabouia, which may indicate that these parasites do not lead to a significant decrease of host energy. Unexpectedly, we find no distance decay similarity relation among parasite communities of host populations, what may be explained by factors such as characteristics of contact between host populations or the transmission mode of most parasite species.