According to a new study, the first louse to live on a mammal likely started out as a bird's nest. The host-jumping event tens of millions of years ago began the long association between mammals and lice, setting the stage for their co evolution and giving more opportunities for the lice to spread to other mammals.
The study compared the genomes and family trees of different types of animals. There are a lot of parallel branches and twigs in the trees. The researchers reported that the genomes of the parasites that killed the mammals were similar to those that killed the branching points.
A group of mammals, including elephants, hyraxes and elephant shrew, originated on the common Ancestor of Afrotheria, a group of mammals primarily of African distribution. The process of host switch led to the colonization of other mammals.
The Prairie Research Institute is located at the University of I.
Two groups are formed by their eating habits. Johnson said that sucking and chewing lice pierce the skin to consume the blood of their host. Both types feed on mammals.
The researchers wrote that the major groups within this newly identified lineage occur on at least one member of Afrotheria. African mammals include elephants, elephant shrews, hyraxes, golden moles, and aardvarks.
Members of Afrotheria were thought to be the original hosts of lice. Johnson and Doa compared the evolutionary history of the mammals and their lice and expanded the sampling of the louse genome. They included parasites from elephant shrews.
The most ancient group of chewing and sucking lice were the elephants, hyraxes and elephant shrews.
This shows that these mammals started out in a weird group of African mammals and then switched to other mammals.
It was very rare for hosts to switch from birds to mammals. Evidence was found that this happened a few times to some animals. After learning how to feed on mammals, they were able to jump from one mammal to another. The analysis found that when certain mammal groups were separated, they differed and so did their parasites.
According to Johnson, the evolutionary history of lice and their hosts is 90 million to 100 million years old.
After dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago, the lice started to jump to new hosts.
There is a paper about the origin of mammal lice.
More information: Kevin Johnson, Phylogenomics reveals the origin of mammal lice out of Afrotheria, Nature Ecology & Evolution (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41559-022-01803-1. www.nature.com/articles/s41559-022-01803-1 Journal information: Nature Ecology & Evolution
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