The genus Philophthalmus, Looss 1899 (Echinostoma: Philophthalmidae) is a cosmopolitan group of parasites that infects the eyes birds and mammals, including humans. A great egret (Ardea alba) was found dead in Kızılırmak Delta, Samsun, Turkey. bird transported to Faculty Veterinary Medicine, Ondokuz Mayıs University, Samsun Turkey, for necropsy. In parasitological examination, trematode detecte...

Ecological immunology is a rapidly expanding field of research that attempts to explain variation in immune function across individuals, populations and species. Birds and ectoparasitic arthropods have frequently been used in attempts to measure the cost of immune function in relation to adult condition, nestling growth and other life history challenges. Unfortunately, most studies in ecologica...

Parasite host switches may trigger disease emergence, but prehistoric host ranges are often unknowable. Lymphatic filariasis and loiasis are major human diseases caused by the insect-borne filarial nematodes Brugia, Wuchereria and Loa. Here we show that the genomes of these nematodes and seven tropical bird lineages exclusively share a novel retrotransposon, AviRTE, resulting from horizontal tr...

BACKGROUND The rising global temperature is predicted to expand the distribution of vector-borne diseases both in latitude and altitude. Many host communities could be affected by increased prevalence of disease, heightening the risk of extinction for many already threatened species. To understand how host communities could be affected by changing parasite distributions, we need information on ...

Until recently, analyses of gender-dependent differences in viability selection and the ontogeny of sexual size dimorphism have been plagued by difficulties in determining the sex of nestling birds on the basis of morphology. Recently, this problem was overcome using molecular sex identification to report for the first time body-size-mediated antagonistic selection on the viability of male and ...

In 1994, the bacterial parasite Mycoplasma gallisepticum expanded its host range and swept through populations of a novel host--eastern US populations of the house finch (Carpodacus mexicanus). This epizootic caused a dramatic decline in finch population numbers, has been shown to have caused strong selection on house finch morphology, and presumably caused evolutionary change at the molecular ...

Invasive species often display different patterns of parasite burden and virulence compared to their native counterparts. These differences may be the result of variability in host-parasite co-evolutionary relationships, the occurrence of novel host-parasite encounters, or possibly innate differences in physiological responses to infection between invasive and native hosts. Here we examine the ...