Meeting Abstract
By their very nature, parasites are hidden and thus hard to sample. Consequently parasites are generally ignored in community surveys and their diversity is poorly understood despite growing appreciation of their contributions to ecosystem function and the potential impacts of parasite extinction. We highlight our limited understanding of parasite diversity and how research on parasites is biased, with the vast majority of work focusing on parasites of medical importance or on helminths and arthropods that infect vertebrate hosts (e.g. livestock and fish and game species). To address this bias and to explore uncharted parasite diversity we turn our attention to the Myxozoa – a speciose clade of endoparasitic cnidarians with complex life cycles. We compare estimates of myxozoan and free-living cnidarian species diversity and summarise our limited knowledge of patterns of myxozoan diversification and geographical distributions. We then review problems of estimating diversity of microparasites like myxozoans and evaluate similarities and differences in estimating diversity of microparasites and macroparasites. Evidence for parasite extinction and its potential knock-on effects leads us to summarise the potential implications of declines in parasite diversity.
