Coevolution of Life on Hosts

For many of us, the mere mention of lice forces an immediate hand to the head, and recollection of childhood experience with nits, special shampoos, etc.  But for a certain breed of biologist, lice make for fascinating scientific fodder, especially so if you are a scientist studying coevolution.  Lice and their various hosts--humans, birds, etc. --provide a stunning example of the ecology of species coevolution.  This system of complex symbiotic relations reveals some of the ecological principles of coevolutionary relations, one of the most exciting areas of research in evolutionary biology of recent.  This work provides an introduction to coevolutionary concepts and approaches, ranging from microevolutionary (ecological) time to macroevolutionary time. The authors then use the system of parasitic lice and their hosts to illustrate some of these different concepts and approaches. They draw examples from a variety of other coevolving systems for comparative purposes, and emphasize the integration of cophylogenetic, comparative, and experimental data in testing coevolutionary hypotheses.  Because lice are permanent parasites that spend their entire lifecycle on the body of the host, their close ecological association makes them ideally suited for this kind of synthetic overview of coevolution.