Marine protected areas facilitate parasite populations among four fished host species of central Chile

Summary Parasites comprise a substantial proportion of global biodiversity and exert important ecological influences on hosts, communities and ecosystems, but our knowledge of how parasite populations respond to human impacts is in its infancy. Here, we present the results of a natural experiment in which we used a system of highly successful marine protected areas and matched open‐access areas in central Chile to assess the influence of fishing‐driven biodiversity loss on parasites of exploited fish and invertebrate hosts. We measured the burden of gill parasites for two reef fishes ( Cheilodactylus variegatus and Aplodactylus punctatus ), trematode parasites for a keyhole limpet ( Fissurella latimarginata ), and pinnotherid pea crab parasites for a sea urchin ( Loxechinus albus ). We also measured host density for all four hosts. We found that nearly all parasite species exhibited substantially greater density (# parasites m −2 ) in protected than in open‐access areas, but only one parasite species (a gill monogenean of C. variegatus ) was more abundant within hosts collected from protected relative to open‐access areas. These data indicate that fishing can drive declines in parasite abundance at the parasite population level by reducing the availability of habitat and resources for parasites, but less commonly affects the abundance of parasites at the infrapopulation level (within individual hosts). Considering the substantial ecological role that many parasites play in marine communities, fishing and other human impacts could exert cryptic but important effects on marine community structure and ecosystem functioning via reductions in parasite abundance.