eng International Academy of Ecology and Environmental Sciences Selforganizology 2410-0080 2015-06-1 2 2 21 34 1 article LiQin Jiang 1 WenJun Zhang zhwj@mail.sysu.edu.cn, wjzhang@iaees.org 1 2 School of Life Sciences, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou 510275, China International Academy of Ecology and Environmental Sciences, Hong Kong Food webs are always self-organizing systems. Parasitism is ubiquitous and important in the food webs. In present study we analyzed the CSM food web with parasites and the predator-prey sub-web without parasites based on some topological indices in order to understand the effects of parasitism on robustness of food webs. The results showed that parasites dominated the food web links. The full CSM food web had more basal species and preys, and the predator-prey sub-web without parasites had more top species and predators. Existence of parasitism did not affect the similarity degree of free-living species, but would reduce the robustness of food web and increase intervality and clustering coefficient of food web. http://www.iaees.org/publications/journals/selforganizology/articles/2015-2(2)/effects-of-parasitism-on-robustness-of-food-webs.pdf parasites CSM food web similarity robustness intervality clustering coefficient