Abstract
Peru is one of the countries with the highest diversity of birds worldwide, having about 1,876 species in its territory. However, studies focused on chewing lice (Phthiraptera) have been carried out on only a minority of bird species. The available data are distributed in 87 publications in the national and international literature. In this checklist we summarize all the records to date of chewing lice on wild and domestic birds in Peru. Among the 301 species of birds studied, 266 species of chewing lice were recorded. The localities with the highest records were the Departments of Cusco, Junín, Lima and Madre de Dios. No records of birds parasitized by these lice have been found in seven departments of Peru. Studies related to lice have only been reported in 16 % of bird species in the country, indicating that research concerning chewing lice has not yet been performed for the the majority of birds in Peru. Dataset published through GBIF (Doi: 10.15470/u1jtiu)
Highlights
Chewing lice (Phthiraptera) are obligate ectoparasites that can be found worldwide on avian hosts, feeding mainly on feathers, blood, dead skin, or secretions (Price et al, 2003; Clayton et al, 2008; Durden, 2019)
Most species of bird lice are highly host–specific as many species have been recorded on a single host, while other species have been recorded on other closely related birds (Tavera et al, 2019)
This revised list was prepared from an extensive bibliographic review of reported lice records on birds from Peru from 1936 to 2020 in the main international databases, as well as physical documents from collections and museums
Summary
Chewing lice (Phthiraptera) are obligate ectoparasites that can be found worldwide on avian hosts, feeding mainly on feathers, blood, dead skin, or secretions (Price et al, 2003; Clayton et al, 2008; Durden, 2019). Birds are most commonly parasitized by two of the four suborders of the Phthiraptera group: Amblycera and Ischnocera (Clayton et al, 2010; Nunes et al, 2014). In Peru, approximately 1,876 species of birds have been recorded through sightings, capture, or song identification (Plenge, 2020). This high diversity situates Peru as the country with the second highest diversity of birds in the world, surpassed only by Colombia (Plenge et al, 2020). The number of bird species with records of lice species is low
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