Study shows how external ecological communities can affect the coevolution of hosts and their parasites
Tuesday, May 24, 2011 - 11:02
in Biology & Nature
(PhysOrg.com) -- In a novel experiment running over three years, evolutionary biologists Christopher Harbison and Dale Clayton, both of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, sought to show that a certain species of lice evolved the way it did, in part due to the way its hosts evolved; while another species of lice on the same hosts, did not. By studying two different types of lice that live in the feathers of doves and pigeons, the two researchers, as described in their paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) show that one of the lice species had a similar evolutionary history to its host, while the other did not, due to its inability to migrate to other birds.