Parasites and other symbionts are crucial components of ecosystems, regulating host populations and supporting food webs. However, most symbiont systems, especially those involving commensals and mutualists, are relatively poorly understood. In this study, we have investigated the nature of the symbiotic relationship between birds and their most abundant and diverse ectosymbionts: the vane‐dwelling feather mites. For this purp...

Aim Highly host‐specific symbionts are very rarely found except with their typical host species. Although switches to new hosts are rare and difficult to detect, a switch to a host phylogenetically distant from the original one (a ‘major host switch’) could allow diversification of the symbionts onto the new host lineage. The consequences of such major host switches on the diversification of highly host‐specific symbionts of a...

Understanding host–symbiont networks is a major question in evolutionary ecology. Birds host a great diversity of endo‐ and ectosymbiotic organisms, with feather mites (Arachnida: Acariformes: Analgoidea, Pterolichoidea) being among the most diverse of avian symbionts. A global approach to the ecology and evolution of bird–feather‐mite associations has been hampered because of the absence of a centralized data repository. Here...

This study considers the interannual variability in the advection of sandeel ( Ammodytes marinus ) larvae on the north‐west European shelf. We use recently collated data on spawning location, age of larvae and the time of hatching (between 1955 and 1993) as input to a particle‐tracking model. Utilizing hourly currents from a 39 year run of a two‐dimensional sea circulation model, cohorts of sandeel larvae were represented as a...

Observations collected in Beatrix Bay, a small bay within Pelorus Sound, New Zealand, show that although the bay is thermally stratified for much of the year, salinity stratification as a result of intermittent rainfall and river inflow plays a dominant role in the density structure and circulation within the Bay. A 3‐dimensional baroclinic model of Pelorus Sound is developed and applied to the simulation of idealised pulses o...