Code associated with Wood et al. 2023. "A reconstruction of parasite burden reveals one century of climate-associated parasite decline." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA. https://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.2211903120
For a complete description of how these data were collected, please see the corresponding manuscript. In brief, we were interested in whether, how, and why parasite burdens had changed for marine fishes over the past century. To address this question, we selected eight fish species that are common in Puget Sound, Washington, USA. We then sourced fluid-preserved natural history specimens of these species from the University of Washington Fish Collection at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture, as well as other museums. Specimens had been collected between 1880 and 2019. We subjected these specimens to parasitological examination, counting and identifying all of their metazoan parasites. We also gathered data on potential environmental drivers of long-term change in parasite burden, including sea surface temperature, pollutant concentrations, and fish density. All data - including the parasitological data that we collected ourselves and the environmental data that were gathered from other sources - are presented here.
final_dataset.csv - This dataset includes all the data we collected, including parasite counts, host body size, collection information for each host, natural history information for each parasite species, and data on sea surface temperature, pollutant concentrations, and fish density.
final_dataset_metadata.csv - This dataset includes metadata for interpreting final_dataset.csv.
parasite_species_codes.csv - This dataset includes a key for translating the long parasite codes presented in final_dataset.csv into short parasite codes presented in the manuscript itself.
Data are available in this repository, and are also permanently archived in Dryad:
Wood, Chelsea et al. (2022), A reconstruction of parasite burden reveals one century of climate-associated parasite decline, Dryad, Dataset, https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.fqz612jwf
The original datasets on environmental drivers (sea surface temperature, pollutant concentrations, and fish density) are available from the following sources:
Sea surface temperature - British Columbia Lightstation Sea-Surface Temperature and Salinity Data (Pacific), 1914-present. https://open.canada.ca/data/en/dataset/719955f2-bf8e-44f7-bc26-6bd623e82884.
Pollutant concentrations - Brandenberger, J. M. et al. Reconstructing trends in hypoxia using multiple paleoecological indicators recorded in sediment cores from Puget Sound, WA. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Silver Spring, MD (2008).
Fish density - Essington, T. et al. Historical reconstruction of the Puget Sound (USA) groundfish community. Mar. Ecol. Prog. Ser. 657, 173–189 (2021). - Greene, C., Kuehne, L., Rice, C., Fresh, K. & Penttila, D. Forty years of change in forage fish and jellyfish abundance across greater Puget Sound, Washington (USA): anthropogenic and climate associations. Mar. Ecol. Prog. Ser. 525, 153–170 (2015).