Checklist of chewing lice (Phthiraptera: Amblycera and Ischnocera) on birds of Peru

Checklist of chewing lice (Phthiraptera: Amblycera and Ischnocera) on birds of Peru. 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. Data published through GBIF (Doi: 10.15470/u1jtiu)


Introduction
Chewing lice (Phthiraptera) are obligate ectoparasites that can be found worldwide on avian hosts, feeding mainly on feathers, blood, dead skin, or secretions 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). 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).
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 . However, the number of bird species with records of lice species is low.
The study of bird lice in Peru began with the renowned world pioneer and specialist in Neotropical Mallophaga, Melbourne Carriker Jr. one of the first researchers to describe lice species in Peruvian birds. Carriker's long trajectory in the study of malophaga began in 1902 Minaya et al.

Fulicoffula sp.
Host: Gallinula sp. Distribution in Peru: Junín. Reference: Dale (1970). Remark: this louse was recorded in Gallinula chloropus by Dale (1970), but this bird is only found in the palaeotropics. Therefore, this was probably an error of identification, and it is Gallinula galeata.

Furnariphilus Price and Clayton, 1995
Furnariphilus griffithsi Price and Clayton, 1995 Host: Sclerurus mexicanus Sclater, 1857. Distribution in Peru: Madre de Dios. Reference: Price and Clayton (1995b). Price and Clayton, 1995 Host: Furnarius leucopus Swainson, 1837. Distribution in Peru: Cusco. Reference: Price and Clayton (1995b). Price andClayton, 1995 Host: Sclerurus caudacutus (Vieillot, 1816 Regarding the hosts, 301 species of birds have been reported, only one of which was reported at the genus level. The bird species in which lice have been recorded are distributed in 23 orders, 61 families and 208 genera (table 2). The Passeriformes order is the group with the highest number of bird species with lice records, accounting for 51 % of the total. The birds with the highest number of lice species reported are Crypturellus soui (Hermann, 1783) and Columba livia (Gmelin, 1789), with 10 species of lice in each, followed by Crypturellus obsoletus (Temminck, 1815), with nine species. Figure 1 shows the distribution of the records of the species of mallophaga and their hosts in the departments of Peru. It shows that 17 departments have at least one report of the bird-mallophaga association, and seven departments have no reports to date (Ayacucho, Apurimac, Huancavelica, Lambayeque, Moquegua, Tacna and Ucayali). The department of Cusco has the highest malignant registry (n = 99), followed by Lima (n = 42). The departments with the highest number of hosts evaluated in the search for mallophaga were Lima (n = 52) and Junin (n = 43). Additionally, there are 19 international reports that do not specify the locality but rather only refer to Peru as the place of origin.

Discussion
Peru is one of the megadiverse countries in bird fauna, being considered the second country with the highest diversity of birds after Colombia . A total of 1,876 species of birds have been sighted in Peru, but studies and reports of mallophaga have been found in only 301. Therefore only 16 % of bird species have been the object of study regaring this topic. The high proportion of species for which there are no reports or   (2013) reported that there are many undescribed species in the genus Myrsidea, and according to our data most of this genus is reported as unidentified, and thus, it is likely to be new species. Likewise, Price and Dalgleish (2007) reported that the Ricinus and Philopterus genera are distributed in the order of Passeriformes birds, specific to certain families of this   La Libertad N order. The vast majority of reports at the genus level were described by Soto-Patiño et al. (2018), who collected a large amount of material on birds from the Manu National Reserve in Cusco. While the large amount of material collected has likely made identification at the species level difficult, we encourage these authors to publish the findings of the material collected from Cusco. The bird species of Columbia livia, Crypturellus obsoletus and C. soui presented the highest number of lice species reported in Peru. These species were also among those that harbored the highest number of lice species in the list prepared by Price et al. (2003) in which other birds, such as albatrosses, crows, pheasants, eagles and hawks, were also found to be hosts to a wide spectrum of lice.
Regarding the state of bird conservation, seven were found to be vulnerable, 20 near threatened, one in danger, and two in critical danger. Conservation status is important to measure the health of biodiversity, and at the same time, it is a tool to catalyze response actions in the face of the threat of reduction of the population of a species (IUCN, 2020). It is important to remember that the coextinction of taxa dependent on specific hosts (mutualists and parasites) and their hosts is a feature of the ongoing wave of global extinctions (Rózsa and Vas, 2015). In the case of critically endangered species, Pseudomenopon dolium is reported in other species of birds, and therefore, coexistence would not apply in association with Podiceps taczanowskii. However, Perineus oblongus has only been reported in the critically endangered Phoebastria irrorata, which if they were to no longer exist would represent a clear case of mutual extinction.
The present list provides a summary of the information available regarding lice associated with birds in the Peruvian territory. It was made in order to serve as a tool for the specific search of reports on this association, as well as describe the distribution of the lice and the birds evaluated in each department, including those that have no study on the subject. Further studies are needed on the study of birds and places lacking these ectoparasite studies in order to discover new associations, create geographical records and identify new species for science.  Naupay, A., Orozco, K., Rodríguez, S., Díaz, Y., Navarro, J., Purca, N., 2017. Ectoparásitos  (1960)(1961)(1962)(1963). Centro Nacional de Patología Animal. SIPA. Ministerio de Agricultura, Lima. Divulgación mimeografiada.

Arxius
Appendix 1. Summary of the birds of Peru parasitized by species of chewing lice: IUCN, International Union for Conservation of Natur (status: CR, critically endangered; EN, endangered; LC, least-concern; NT, near threatened; VU, vulnerable).

Specie Common names IUCN Lice References
Order Accipitriformes Fam. Accipitridae