Marine birds and their parasites comprise the study model of a research study published in the journal PLoS ONE to gain a better understanding of the trophic relationships between host and parasite. The project, signed by experts Jacob González-Solís and Elena Gómez, of the Department of Animal Biology of the UB, opens a new perspective on how trophic relationships between hosts and parasites can be deciphered based on the use of isotopic markers which, for the first time, are applied to the study of parasites in birds. The research is centered on the trophic relationships between shearwaters and some ectoparasites in particular: three species of feather lice (Halipeurus abnormis, Austromenopon echinatum and Saemundssonia peusi) and a type of flea, Xenopsylla gratiosa. From a global perspective, the scientific work of Jacob González-Solís and Elena Gómez provides deeper insight into the co-evolution between hosts and parasites, their phylogenetic relationships and the conservation problems of marine birds in the northeastern Atlantic and Mediterranean. Marine birds are being increasingly threatened by the mortality caused by fishing, by competing for resources due to fishing overexploitation, by the loss of their breeding habitat, by the introduction of predators in their nesting islands and by environmental pollution.

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