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

Host-shift speciation and cospeciation are the two major processes driving symbiont macroevolutionary diversification. Cospeciation is expected to be frequent in vertically transmitted and host-specific symbionts, and leads to congruent host-symbiont phylogenies. However, the cophylogenetic dynamics of many groups of highly specialized host-specific symbionts is largely unstudied. Thus, the relevance of cospeciation vs. host-shift speciation remains largely unknown. Here, this question is...