Transmission to new hosts is a fundamental challenge for parasites. Some species meet this challenge by hitchhiking on other, more mobile parasite species, a behaviour known as phoresis. For example, feather-feeding lice that parasitise birds disperse to new hosts by hitchhiking on parasitic louse flies, which fly between individual birds. Oddly, however, some species of feather lice do not eng...

as there is no data available on parasite infection of pigeons (columba livia) in the region, the present study was carried out on domestic pigeons in mashhad city in the north-east of iran. three hundred specimens were examined for the presence of ecto and endoparasites. a total of 300 pigeons, %21.6(n=65) and %15.3(n=46) were infected with nematodes and cestodes respectively whereas no tremat...

Birds combat ectoparasites with many defences but the first line of defence is grooming behaviour, which includes preening with the bill and scratching with the feet. Preening has been shown to be very effective against ectoparasites. However, most tests have been with feather lice, which are relatively slow moving. Less is known about the effectiveness of preening as a defence against more mob...

Phoresy is a behaviour where one organism hitches a ride on another more mobile organism. This is a common dispersal mechanism amongst relatively immobile species that specialise on patchy resources. Parasites specialise on patchily distributed resources: their hosts. Although host individuals are isolated in space and time, parasites must transmit between hosts or they will die with their host...

The proportion of hybridization and introgression between the endemic Phoenix canariensis (Canarian date palm) and the introduced P. dactylifera (date palm), were characterized using a multilocus isozyme genotype, based on 17 isozyme loci. In order to evaluate the multilocus isozyme genotype’s ability to detect hybridization and introgression between the endemic Phoenix canariensis and the intr...

PREMISE OF THE STUDY Nuclear microsatellite markers were developed in Rumex bucephalophorus subsp. canariensis (Polygonaceae) to investigate its genetic diversity and structure. METHODS AND RESULTS Sixteen polymorphic microsatellite markers were obtained using 454 next-generation sequencing with di-, tri-, and tetranucleotide repeats. The average number of alleles was 5.688 and 3.813 for R. b...