Abstract
Biological communities may be assembled by both niche-based and dispersal-based (= historic) processes with the relative importance of these processes in community assembly being scale- and context-dependent. To infer whether (a) niche‐based or dispersal‐based processes play the main role in the assembly of flea communities parasitic on small mammals and whether (b) the main processes of flea community assembly are scale-dependent, we applied a novel permutation-based algorithm (PER-SIMPER) and the dispersal–niche continuum index (DNCI), to data on the species incidence of fleas and their hosts at two spatial scales. At the larger (continental) scale, we analysed flea communities in four biogeographic realms across adjacent continental sections. At the smaller (local) scale, we considered flea communities across two main regions (lowlands and mountains) and seven habitat types within Slovakia. Our analyses demonstrated that species composition of fleas and their small mammalian hosts depended predominantly on historical processes (dispersal) at both scale. This was true for the majority of biogeographic realms at continental scale (except the Nearctic) and both regions at local scale. Nevertheless, strong niche-based assembly mechanism was found in the Nearctic assemblages. At local scale, the intensity of dispersal processes was weaker and niche-driven processes were stronger between habitats within a region than between mountain and lowland regions. We provide historical and ecological explanations for these patterns. We conclude that the assembly of compound flea communities is governed, to a great extent, by the dispersal processes acting on their hosts and, to a lesser extent, by the niche-based processes.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Dr. Gilles Escarguel for help with PerSIMPER and DNCI ideas and development. This study was partly supported by Israel Science Foundation (grant 149/17 to BRK and ISK). This is publication no. 1103 of the Mitrani Department of Desert Ecology.
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BRK and CG conceived the idea, CG developed methodology, BRK, GIS, MS and ISK collected the data, CG carried out the analyses, CG and BK wrote the manuscript, all authors finalized the manuscript.
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Gibert, C., Shenbrot, G.I., Stanko, M. et al. Dispersal-based versus niche-based processes as drivers of flea species composition on small mammalian hosts: inferences from species occurrences at large and small scales. Oecologia 197, 471–484 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-021-05027-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-021-05027-1