A variety of analytical approaches have been suggested to detect associations in parasite communities, primarily focusing on macroparasite (parasitic helminth) communities (e.g., [4, 39, 47, 48] ). However, they implicitly assume that the direction and strength of an observed association between parasite species reflects an underlying biological interaction, and their reliability to detect interactions has been recently questioned [49] . The adoption of a generalized linear mixed modelling (GLMM)-based approach has been rather suggested by Fenton et al. [49] (see also [50] ). Apparently more robust to detect interactions between macroparasites, this method has the advantage of offering the opportunity of taking into account the variance caused by other factors.