Characterization of the ecological and evolutionary patterns of
parasites
We expected that the ecological and evolutionary processes leave
signatures in the resulting composition of parasite species and
phylogenetic trees of parasites; thus, we compared both the structure of
phylogenies and the composition of the parasite species in the empirical
data with those resulting from the simulations. We compared the species
composition using the beta diversity of multiple-site dissimilarities (β
- Baselga 2010; 2013a, b). The structure of the phylogenetic trees was
characterized by measuring the tree imbalance, using the normalized
Sackin index (In - Blum & François 2005). As each
empirical case represents particular ecological and evolutionary
processes, we analysed whether there was an optimal range of
host-switching intensity that reproduced each composition (β) and
normalized Sackin index (In). To reproduce the scenarios
that best fit the empirical situations, we assumed that the simulations
needed to reproduce both the β and the In metrics
simultaneously (with a \(\pm 5\%\)confidence interval). Then we compared
the resulting host-switching intensity among the empirical cases
analysed to understand how it varied for different evolutionary
histories. Statistical analyses were performed using ‘ape’ (Paradis &
Schliep 2019), ‘betapart’ (Baselga et al. 2018) ‘picante’ (Kembel et al.
2010), ‘phytools’ (Revell 2012) and ‘vegan’ (Oksanen et al. 2013) R
packages.