Evolutionary lability of host associations promotes phylogenetic overdispersion of co-infecting blood parasites

1. Co-infections with multiple parasite taxa are ubiquitous in nature and have the potential to impact the co-evolutionary dynamics between host and parasite, though patterns of phylogenetic community structure of co-infecting parasites and the processes that generate these patterns have rarely been studied across diverse host-parasite communities.
2. Here, we tested for the roles of host and parasite evolutionary history as well as environmental variables as drivers of phylogenetic community structure among co-infecting haemosporidian (malaria) parasites and their avian hosts in the North American boreal forest, a region characterized by an extraordinarily high blood parasite co-infection rate.
3. We used multiple methods to identify non-random patterns of co-infection among parasite species and determined whether these patterns were influenced more by co-evolutionary host associations or environmental variables. We used model-based approaches to test whether parasites that occurred ...