Projects

Category	Entomology, Parasitology & Disease
Project	63-03 - Cospeciation between birds and their parasitic mites
Project Leader	Spicer
Affiliation	UC San Francisco Dept of Biology
Objective	Host-parasite systems are a powerful arena for evolutionary research because the environment of many parasites is defined almost exclusively by its host. In this way, factors governing evolution are easier to delineate for parasites than for free-living organisms. This is particularly true for parasites which complete their entire life cycle on the body of a single host. In some cases the phylogeny of these parasites is congruent with that of the host, indicating cospeciation between host and parasite. Cospeciating host-parasite systems are unique in that they represent a long history of parallel evolution. This is important because it provides a temporal framework for comparative analyses of the rates of evolution of the host and parasite. Because the life histories of hosts and their parasites are generally extremely different, studying the molecular evolution in a host-parasite system can provide insight into questions relating to the possible effects of generation time, metabolic rate, and other life history parameters on rates of mutation and evolutionary change.