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Content with tag feather mites .

Feather mites, small “vacuum cleaners” that clean the plumage of birds at night

A research team from the Doñana Biological Station (CSIC), the University of Granada, and the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign, USA) has studied the nocturnal activity of mites living...

Feather mites play a role in cleaning host feathers

Parasites and other symbionts are crucial components of ecosystems, regulating host populations and supporting food webs. However, most symbiont systems, especially those involving commensals and...

Infrapopulation size explains genetic diversity in a host-symbiont non-model system

Understanding what shapes variation in genetic diversity among species remains a major challenge in evolutionary ecology, and it has been seldom studied in parasites and other host-symbiont...

Powerful tools to improve studies of feather mites

Feather mites are among the most abundant and commonly occurring bird ectosymbionts. Basic questions on the ecology and evolution of feather mites remain unanswered because feather mite species...