Current ecological knowledge shows the relevance of parasites for the functioning of ecosystems, fueling our interest to conserve this biodiversity. Parasitism is one of the outcomes of the interaction between hosts and their symbionts, but potential outcomes span from parasitism to mutualism. Symbiont species can move along (at least part) of this parasitism-mutualism continuum and same occurs in evolutionary time across the tree of life. Here, I will argue that parasite conservation would gain by embracing all symbionts instead of focusing only on “true” parasites.
Results/Conclusions
The study of vane-dwelling feather mites could serve as an example. Through correlative, microscopy, and DNA metabarcoding we have shown the mutualistic nature of the relationship between birds and their most abundant (but little known) ectosymbionts, and the potential context-dependence of this relationship. Moreover, we have found that we can not understand bird-feather mite interaction in isolation, but that other bird symbionts such as fungi and bacteria are needed in the equation. And finally, that the study of these mutualistic feather mites is reciprocally enriched by comparing them with bird parasites. Overall, this shows how little we still know about the biology of major symbiont groups, the relevance of taking into account the ecological interactions among them, and the need of studying symbiotic systems as a whole. I will discuss some future steps on this direction and why it matters for the conservation biology of symbionts.