How well lice are able to latch onto pigeon flies and catch a lift to new bird hosts affects how the lice evolve. Lice species carried aloft by flies spread to more species and tend to speciate at ...

Dec. 8, 2003 – University of Utah biologists twirled louse-infested bird feathers on an electric fan and flew pigeons and doves like kites on strings in a study that found small lice stick to small ...

(PhysOrg.com) -- In a novel experiment running over three years, evolutionary biologists Christopher Harbison and Dale Clayton, both of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, sought to show that a ...

Using host-specific parasites isolated on individual pigeon 'islands,' the scientists showed that descendants of a single population of feather lice adapted rapidly in response to preening. They found ...

Biologists drove the divergence of different-sized feather lice from a single population. In four years, the evolved lice had trouble mating with each other -- a sign of speciation. A few years ago, ...

The results, published yesterday (May 23) online in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggest that the coevolution of hosts and parasites can be influenced by other species in the ...

Newswise — When naturalist Charles Darwin stepped onto the Galapagos Islands in 1835, he encountered a bird that sparked a revolutionary theory on how new species originate. From island to island, ...