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 permanently on bird flight feathers. They have found that feather mites are nocturnal beings: they move, feed, and lay eggs at night while the bird sleeps. It has been estimated that they clean ca. 80,000?m2 of “dirt” (fungi, bacteria, and other particles) in just European passerines

Feather mites are useful models for studying speciation due to their high diversity and strong degree of host specialization. However, studies to date have focused on the evolution of higher-level mite taxa while much hidden diversity likely occurs at the level of host genera and species. In this study, the diversity and evolution of feather mites infesting six sympatric seabird species from six genera, breeding in the Cape Verde archipelago, were examined.

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 mutualists, are relatively poorly understood. In this study, the nature of the symbiotic relationship between birds and their most abundant and diverse ectosymbionts, the vane?dwelling feather mites, has been investigated.

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 systems. Here, mtDNA variation has been studied in a host-symbiont non-model system.

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 identification is laborious even for specialised taxonomists. Here, DNA barcoding was tested as a useful molecular tool to identify feather mites from passerine birds.