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Parasite Conservation and the Black‐Footed Ferret Recovery Program

Many species of vertebrates harbor diverse parasite faunas. Often these species of parasites are host-specific, and some spend their entire life cycle on the host. As a result, when the population size of a host is reduced, the population sizes of these host-specific parasites also may be reduced. The decline in the parasite population may be exacerbated if contact between hosts is rare but necessary for transmission between hosts. A decrease in the population size of a host may result in a decrease in the contact rates of individual hosts due, for example, to population social structure, nonrandom dispersal patterns, or geographical subdivision in the population. Populations of parasites on the few remaining hosts may go extinct due to normal stochastic fluctuations in population size before contact between hosts allows migration and recovery. The population dynamics of species of parasites raise philosophical and applied problems for practitioners of conservation biology—problems that have received scant attention. Large, charismatic, or economically important species such as pandas and salmonids receive far more attention and recovery resources than do small, less renowned species such as invertebrates. Parasitic species are currently the victims of this unfortunate circumstance, and interest in the conservation biology of parasites is rare. Whether parasitic species should be the losers among current conservation priorities is a topic that deserves far more discussion.