Of Lice and Birds

Comparative tests of ectoparasite species richness in seabirds.

2007-11-15T12:16:00.000Z

This is the first time that I have published in a BMC journal and I have been very impressed with the speed at which it has been published. It went through a tough reviewing process of almost 5 months. The comments made were very useful and detailed but once accepted, it all went very fast. I would definitely recommend publishing with biomed central.

The lice of the Tristan da Cunha Archipelago

2007-07-17T08:30:00.000Z

Christine Hanel has just published her paper with Ricardo Palma on the lice of Tristan da Cunha Archipelago with detailed information on the hosts and the distribution on the different islands of the Archipelago.

HÄNEL, C. & PALMA, R.L. 2007. The lice of the Tristan da Cunha
Archipelago (Insecta: Phthiraptera). Beiträge zur Entomology
57(1):105-133.

Pectinopygus and Pelecaniforme cospeciation

2007-04-30T14:54:00.000Z

We have recently published "Multiple Cophylogenetic Analyses Reveal Frequent Cospeciation between Pelecaniform Birds and Pectinopygus Lice." All the additional data for this paper can be obtained from my website, Treebase and GenBank.
Hopefully, this will provide a dataset for future tests of cospeciation methodologies.

Vince Smith's blog

2007-03-05T16:20:00.000Z

Vince has a new website and blog with lots of useful info and links for lice.

Lousebuster

2006-12-04T09:36:00.000Z

Dale Clayton has invented a huge hair dryer that sucks the life out of head lice. The study shows that it is very effective and significantly reduces the number of lice in 30 to 35 min. No need for those powerful delousing shampoos.

Sharing comparative data

2006-12-01T10:04:00.000Z

I've recently been trying to gather useful information for comparative analyses in birds and lice. Unfortunately, I have had to follow the tracks of others, repeating their work, simply because most researchers are selfish with their data. The researchers I have contacted have not answered my request for their published comparative datasets. I find this very frustrating. No wonder research in the field of evolutionary ecology is particularly slow. We continuously repeat the work of others instead of building upon it. Wouldn't it be lovely if ecologists were obliged to publish their raw data on the web as is required for other fields of biology like phylogenetics, genomics and proteomics (it is a prerequisite to publication that the sequence data should be online). Why is this not the case for ecologists? Is it because there is no appropriate database? Well, I don't think the infrastructure is needed. Just publishing the data as a text file on the web would be enough.
Today, we even have applications like EditGrid on the web. This provides an ideal solution for gathering ecological data and sharing it. I have been using EditGrid to gather information on various seabirds and I am making it available to the public. The following graph illustrates the variables used and the number of data entries for each variable.
If you believe in open access and have any type of ecological or morphological data for birds that you would like to share with the world, please do get in touch.

pelecaniform ecology evolution

Pelecaniform birds and lice

2006-11-30T15:19:00.000Z

Our article on cospeciation Pectinopygus lice and Pelecaniform birds has been recently accepted for publication in Systematic Biology. It unambiguously support cospeciation between the birds and the lice by using multiple cophylogenetic methods (TreeMap, TreeFitter, ParaFit, Coalescence, ILD) including the calibration of host and parasite phylogenies to provide support for similar timing of speciation in both hosts and parasites.

Mike Charleston enters the blogsphere

2006-07-10T09:22:00.000Z

Mike Charleston, the brains behind TreeMap 2.0, has set up a blog on cophylogeny. As Mike notes, TreeMap 2 is an elegant solution, but has trouble handling large (>20 taxa) problems. We'll watch with interest his efforts to put go faster stripes on TreeMap.

Shearwaters phylogeography

2006-06-01T12:48:00.000Z

Elena, who recently worked in the lab, has published a paper in MPE on the phylogeopgraphy of shearwaters using morphological and molecular data (sequencing Cytb and Domain I of the mitochondrial control region). They showed that oceanic fronts like the Almeria-Oran Oceanographic Front, can be important barriers shaping populations and species structures in seabirds. This front is the real boundary between the Mediterranean and Atlantic surface waters and thus plays an important role as a distribution barrier opposing the previous hypothesis that the Gibraltar Strait was the barrier.
As the control region and Cytb did not provide quite enough resolution about the degree of isolation between different populations in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic populations (these popualtions show an increase in size from east to west), perhaps a population study of the ectoparasitic lice of shearwaters, that have genes that evolve faster than their hosts, could be used to gain further information on the population structure of shearwaters as well as providing data for the study of cospeciation at a population level.

First post

2006-05-24T15:58:00.000Z

In the beginning there were lice and then birds! Or was it the other way round?