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.