Transmission strategy modulates parasite biogeography in an island-colonising bird

Abstract

Parasites occur in every ecosystem, although their dispersal is often constrained by the availability of hosts or vectors. Here, we explore how variation in parasite life history traits, particularly transmission strategy, may influence their distributions. Specifically, we test whether a variety of parasites ad-here to the rules of island biogeography, and whether their distributions vary with transmission strategy. We utilised broad-spectrum parasite detection from existing Whole Genome Sequence (WGS) data to characterise parasites with varying transmission strategies from the blood of a passerine bird, the silvereye (Zosterops lateralis), sampled across 25 islands in the South Pacific and from five of the states in mainland Australia. Overall, parasite richness was higher on mainland Australia compared to islands and decreased with distance of islands from the Australian continent. However, these patterns were dependent on transmission strategy. For parasites transmitted by flying insect vectors, richness decreased on islands compared to the mainland. However, increasing isolation from the mainland among islands had little further impact. On the other hand, richness of directly transmitted parasites and those requiring another intermediate host declined sharply with increasing distance from the mainland. While islands may act as an initial barrier to colonisation for parasites relying on flying insect vectors, their highly dispersive vectors may subsequently reduce the impact of increasing isolation distance on richness. Our work underscores the importance of considering parasite life-histories and their transmission strategies for understanding the processes that shape parasite communities on islands.