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Painless mites
My freezers at work are getting rather full, so I’ve been washing birds and sending the clean bodies to the Royal Alberta Museum. Last week I washed a batch of white-throated sparrows (Zonotrichia...
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On the backs of wasps
In March, I was given two specimens of solitary wasps that were covered with mites. The first was one of several Crossocerus (Crabronidae) that had overwintered in holes in a wooden chair left outside...
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What happens when you ask an undergrad to draw a spider?*
This summer the arthropodologists in my department are being moved from one building to another, as part of the mysterious game of reshuffling that university administrators so enjoy. As preparation...
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Smaller fleas
In his very long poem on the nature of poets, Jonathan Swift famously noted that parasites can themselves be parasitzed. A few weeks ago I came across an interesting case of hyperparasitism. I had...
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Brazilian Beauties
A couple of weeks ago my colleague Fabio Akashi Hernandes* from the Universidade Estadual Paulista sent me the file for a poster that I immediately printed on high-gloss paper and proudly affixed to...
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Is That a Wombat on Your Belly, Or Are You Just Happy to See Me?
I attended a Ph.D. defense a few weeks ago on the effects of salmon lice (which are copepods, not insects) on their juvenile hosts. The student showed some gory photos and pointed out that for such a...
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Mystery of the Mangy-Squirrel Slurry
A few years ago I worked with members of the Vancouver Rat Project to investigate the cause of lumpy ears in rats from one of the shipping ports in that city. The rodents turned out to have ear mange...
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A Less Notorious Bee Mite
The mite Varroa destructor has become famous in the wake of colony collapse disorder as a nasty parasite of the domestic honey bee Apis mellifera. But it is not the only bee-associated member of the...
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Who likes shrews? These mites do!
My friend Allan Lindoe, fossil preparator extraordinaire, lives on an acreage near Athabasca and makes the journey south to Edmonton about once a week to carefully remove rocky matrix from around the...
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Mystery of the Mangy Squirrel Slurry – solved!
A few posts ago I presented a puzzle – what were the strange arthropod-like creatures I found in a KOH-dissolved slurry of eastern gray squirrel skin? I canvassed colleagues from around the world, and...
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