Welcome to the Reed Lab
Welcome to the Reed Lab. We study mammals, their ectoparasites, and even bacteria that live within the parasites. In the assemblages that we study, the parasites often track the evolutionary history of their hosts. There is much to learn about how and why distantly related organisms (like mammals, lice and bacteria) sometimes get trapped in long-term coevolutionary scenarios. Pocket gophers have parasitic lice that live in their fur. These lice are finely adapted for life there, and they die if they fall off their host. The lice rarely get the chance to hop onto another gopher because gophers are solitary. As a result, lineages of lice get trapped on lineages of gophers, which is a process that extends through ecological time and into evolutionary time. If the gopher lice occasionally can hop onto a new gophers species and survive, then the process of coevolution will get interrupted, which we know has happened periodically. From experimental work we know that gopher lice can live on the wrong species of gopher if the new gopher has hair that the louse can easily grasp (some do not). Ecological interactions like grasping hairs (or failing to) have a lasting effect in coevolving assemblages such as these, which makes these systems interesting to study. In more recent work we’ve tried to address the question “to what extent can you infer the evolutionary history of the host (mammal) simply by uncovering the evolutionary history of the parasite (lice)?” After all, if a man is known by the company perhaps we can learn much about human evolutionary history by studying human parasites. We apply this principle broadly to several mammal assemblages.
Jonathan Swift
(Poetry, a Rhapsody, 1733)
So, naturalists observe, a flea
Has smaller fleas that on him prey;
And these have smaller still to bite ’em;
And so proceed ad infinitum.
