Collaborate

Stable Isotope Parasitology

A Global IsoEcol Collaborative Project

Organizer: Amandine Sabadel (Otago, New Zealand)

Stable isotopes have been used infrequently over the last two decades to characterize host-parasite trophic relationships. The main reason for the scarcity of data are the lack of obvious patterns in the N stable isotope values of parasites vs their host tissues, which is a key to understanding any host-parasite system dynamics.

To circumvent this and to leverage the potential of stable isotopes in parasitology, we propose to do a world-wide meta-analysis of a wide range of host-parasite stable isotope data. We plan to include 15N, 13C and possibly 34S into the mix. By aiming big and collecting a large number of host-parasite pairs worldwide, we hypothesize that generalizable patterns may be identified that would greatly inform future research in the field.

Interested? If you commonly get rid of the parasites attached or found within your studied species, now is the time to stop throwing them out and run bulk stable isotope on them instead!

Requirements: Ability to collect and/or analyze various parasite samples and accompanying metadata for stable isotope analyses and database collation.

Interested? Please contact: amandine.sabadel@otago.ac.nz & afilion90@gmail.com

Progress on this global collaborative project will be presented at the IsoEcol 2022 meeting.