Soil, Plant and Ecological Sciences Division, Lincoln University

Cophylogenetic relationships of penguins and their chewing lice

Penguins, parasites and phylogenies: a molecular analysis of penguin and louse coevolution. Chewing lice spend their entire life-cycle on the body of their host as they have no active way of moving from one host to another (relying on physical encounters such as copulation to transfer between hosts). As transfer to novel host species is uncommon, this is thought to have led to 'speciation by isolation' with chewing lice forming new species once they have been isolated on their host species (much as free living animals speciated once they were isolated on oceanic islands).

This study aimed to collect all 15 species of lice parasiting all 17 species of penguins and use molecular and morphological characters to produce a phylogeny for the lice to determine whether or not 'speciation by isolation' is occurring.

Publications

Banks, J.C. Paterson A. M. A penguin-chewing louse (Insecta: Phthiraptera) phylogeny derived from morphology. Invertebrate Systematics 18: 89-100, 2004.

Banks, J.C. Cophylogenetic relationships of penguins and their chewing lice. Lincoln University, PhD. 2003.

Banks, J.C. Palma R.L. A new species and new host records of Austrogoniodes (Insecta: Phthiraptera: Philopteridae) from penguins (Aves: Sphenisciformes). New Zealand Journal of Zoology 30: 69-75, 2003.

Banks, J.C. et al. An unexpected pattern of molecular divergence within the blue penguin (Eudyptula minor) complex. Notornis 49: 29-38, 2002.