Finally, after five years of hard work by Gunnar Kvifte and me, its finally here- our paper on fossil frog - biting midges (Diptera, Corethrellidae) and species level phylogeny of the family is out!
We have described two new species of the small cute midges from 36 million years old Ukrainian amber from Rovno, and build a quantitative phylogeny using Bayesian a-posteriori analysis. So what the big deal? Why some small fossil midges matters? Well, Gunnar promised to write a detailed guest blog about that, and i am living it to him. I will just give a hint: frog-biting midges are biting frogs... and drinking their blood, while doing so Corethrellidae are transmitting frogs blood parasites - trypanosoms. Trypanosoms, midges and frogs are forming a host-vector parasite system, not to different from lets say humans-Anopheles mosquitoes-malaria plasmodium, but, unlike humans, frogs and Corethrellidae are very diverse, so we can sample co-evolution of hosts, vectors and parasites in delightful diversity. If we would understand co-evolution of this system, it might help us to fight many of human vector diseases, and maybe even tackle emerging diseases...
So i am leaving floor to Gunnar now, and looking forward to his entry...
Here is one of the described corethrellides by the way...
We have described two new species of the small cute midges from 36 million years old Ukrainian amber from Rovno, and build a quantitative phylogeny using Bayesian a-posteriori analysis. So what the big deal? Why some small fossil midges matters? Well, Gunnar promised to write a detailed guest blog about that, and i am living it to him. I will just give a hint: frog-biting midges are biting frogs... and drinking their blood, while doing so Corethrellidae are transmitting frogs blood parasites - trypanosoms. Trypanosoms, midges and frogs are forming a host-vector parasite system, not to different from lets say humans-Anopheles mosquitoes-malaria plasmodium, but, unlike humans, frogs and Corethrellidae are very diverse, so we can sample co-evolution of hosts, vectors and parasites in delightful diversity. If we would understand co-evolution of this system, it might help us to fight many of human vector diseases, and maybe even tackle emerging diseases...
So i am leaving floor to Gunnar now, and looking forward to his entry...
Here is one of the described corethrellides by the way...
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