Sentence examples for bird louse from inspiring English sources

Bird louse, (suborder Amblycera and Ischnocera), any of two groups of chewing lice (order Phthiraptera) that live on birds and feed on feathers, skin, and sometimes blood.

The scientists also used fossils in building their louse family tree: a 44-million-year-old bird louse fossil and a 100-million-year-old book louse fossil (a nonparasitic louse closely related to parasitic lice).

The first is an exceptionally preserved 44 Ma bird louse fossil [ 17], and the second is a 100 Ma fossil of the book-louse family Liposcelididae [ 18], which is the closest free-living relative of parasitic lice [ 13].

Even bird lice and mites are mostly specific to the species that carries them, Dr. LaBranche said, and are hard to spread to other members of the same bird family, let alone people.

Moreover, because some bird lice seem to have deeper evolutionary roots than mammal lice do, the team suggests that birds whose feathers make a good roosting place for lice became infested first and then passed the pests on to mammals.

Rasmussen revealed the true extent of the major fraud perpetrated by the eminent British soldier, ornithologist and expert on bird lice, Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen.

Meinertzhagen, who died in 1967, was the author of numerous taxonomic and other works on birds, and possessed a vast collection of bird and bird lice specimens; he was considered to be one of Britain's greatest ornithologists.

Males with long streamers also have larger white tail spots, and since feather-eating bird lice prefer white feathers, large white tail spots without parasite damage again demonstrate breeding quality; there is a positive association between spot size and the number of offspring produced each season.

The latter two issues have successfully been taken into account in a study of Neotropical bird lice [ 9].

Long PCRs for bird lice were performed using Elongase (Invitrogen, Carlsbad, California) with the following cycling conditions: 92°C for 2 min; 40 cycles of 92°C for 30 sec, 50°C for 30 sec, 68°C for 12 min; and a final extension step of 68° for 20 min. Sequencing was performed using ABI BigDye ver. 3 dye terminator sequencing technology and run on ABI 3770 or ABI 3740 capillary sequencers.

As Johnson et al. [ 4] suggest, avian hosts share many similarities with island systems, and the bird-feather louse system is an ideal model for studying how host-parasite interactions lead to ecologically driven speciation and could be a useful comparison for other parasite radiations.