So he reached out to the curator of the collection, research zoologist Anna Phillips , at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. The first step was to sort through a lot of old paper records. Her team of researchers digitzed tens of thousands of specimens and their locations in an online database, creating what Carlson calls the biggest parasite record of its kind. Using this immense resource, researchers could then use computer models to predict what would happen to more than different parasite species when climate change altered their habitats, based on how their ranges have changed over the past two centuries.
Their conclusion: Even under the most optimistic scenarios, roughly 10 percent of parasite species will go extinct by In the most dire version of events, fully one-third of all parasites could vanish. This kind of die-off would have myriad unfortunate consequences. Consider that parasites play an important role in regulating the populations of their hosts and the balance of the overall ecosystem.
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Science Coronavirus Coverage U. There are three main groups of helminths derived from the Greek word for worms that are human parasites:. Although the term ectoparasites can broadly include blood-sucking arthropods such as mosquitoes because they are dependent on a blood meal from a human host for their survival , this term is generally used more narrowly to refer to organisms such as ticks, fleas, lice, and mites that attach or burrow into the skin and remain there for relatively long periods of time e.
Arthropods are important in causing diseases in their own right, but are even more important as vectors, or transmitters, of many different pathogens that in turn cause tremendous morbidity and mortality from the diseases they cause.
Parasitic infections cause a tremendous burden of disease in both the tropics and subtropics as well as in more temperate climates. Of all parasitic diseases, malaria causes the most deaths globally. Malaria kills more than , people each year, most of them young children in sub-Saharan Africa.
The Neglected Tropical Diseases NTDs , which have suffered from a lack of attention by the public health community, include parasitic diseases such as lymphatic filariasis , onchocerciasis , and Guinea worm disease. The NTDs affect more than 1 billion people worldwide, largely in rural areas of low-income countries.
These diseases extract a large toll on endemic populations, including lost ability to attend school or work, stunting of growth in children, impairment of cognitive skills and development in young children, and the serious economic burden placed on entire countries. We have no credible way of estimating how many parasitic protozoa, fungi, bacteria, and viruses exist. Because patterns of parasite diversity do not clearly map onto patterns of host diversity, we can make very little prediction about geographical patterns of threat to parasites.
If the threats reflect those experienced by avian hosts, then we expect climate change to be a major threat to the relatively small proportion of parasite diversity that lives in the polar and temperate regions, whereas habitat destruction will be the major threat to tropical parasite diversity. This implies that parasite extinctions may have unforeseen costs that impact the health and abundance of a large number of free-living species.
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