Parasitism alters three power laws of scaling in a metazoan community: Taylor’s law, density-mass allometry, and variance-mass allometry

Abstract

How do the lifestyles (free-living unparasitized, free-living parasitized, and parasitic) of animal species affect major ecological power-law relationships? We investigated this question in metazoan communities in lakes of Otago, New Zealand. In 13,752 samples comprising 1,037,058 organisms, we found that species of different lifestyles differed in taxonomic distribution and body mass and were well described by three power laws: a spatial Taylor’s law (the spatial variance in population density was a power-law function of the spatial mean population density); density-mass allometry (the spatial mean population density was a power-law function of mean body mass); and variance-mass allometry (the spatial variance in population density was a power-law function of mean body mass). To our knowledge, this constitutes the first empirical confirmation of variance-mass allometry for any animal community. We found that the parameter values of all three relationships differed for species with different lifestyles in the same communities. Taylor's law and density-mass allometry accurately predicted the form and parameter values of variance-mass allometry. We conclude that species of different lifestyles in these metazoan communities obeyed the same major ecological power-law relationships but did so with parameters specific to each lifestyle, probably reflecting differences among lifestyles in population dynamics and spatial distribution.