|
Anthea Carmichael
|
|||||||||||
 |
|||||||||||
 |
I am interested in the cospeciation between birds and their parasitic mites. Birds have three different mites: nasal mites, feather mites, and quill mites. I am studying nasal mites, which inhabit the nares and turbinates of a bird’s upper beak. These mites spend their entire life cycle in their host, which is a good indication that these mites might be evolving in parallel with their bird hosts. I am using a variety of nuclear and mitochondrial genes to reconstruct a molecular phylogeny of mites from different bird species. I will then analyze the mite and bird phylogenies together to identify congruent relationships between birds and their mites. If the phylogenies indicate that cospeciation processes are at work, I can make inferences about relative rates of evolution between these two groups with very different life histories | ||||||||||
 |
|||||||||||
 |
|||||||||||
 |
|||||||||||
 |
|||||||||||
 |
|||||||||||
