Abstract A core goal of ecology is to understand the abiotic and biotic variables that regulate species distributions and community composition. A major obstacle is that the rules governing species distributions can change with spatial scale. Here, we illustrate this point using data from a spatially nested metacommunity of parasites infecting a metapopulation of threespine stickleback fish from 34 lakes on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. Like most parasite metacommunities, the composition of stickleback parasites differs among host individuals within each host population, and differs between host populations. The distribution of each parasite taxon depends, to varying degrees, on individual host traits (e.g., mass, diet) and on host‐population characteristics (e.g., lake size, mean host mass, mean diet). However, in most cases in this data set, a given parasite was regulated by different factors at the host‐individual and host‐population scales, leading to scale‐dependent patterns of parasite‐species co‐occurrence.

中文翻译：

---

宿主斑块特征对棘鱼寄生虫群落物种组成的规模依赖性影响

摘要 生态学的一个核心目标是了解调节物种分布和群落组成的非生物和生物变量。一个主要障碍是控制物种分布的规则会随着空间尺度而变化。在这里，我们使用来自感染来自不列颠哥伦比亚省温哥华岛 34 个湖泊的三刺棘鱼群落的寄生虫的空间嵌套元群落的数据来说明这一点。像大多数寄生虫元群落一样，棘鱼寄生虫的组成在每个宿主种群中的宿主个体之间不同，并且在宿主种群之间也不同。每个寄生虫分类群的分布在不同程度上取决于个体宿主特征（例如，质量、饮食）和宿主种群特征（例如，湖泊大小、平均宿主质量、平均饮食）。然而，