A couple of weeks ago my colleague Fabio Akashi Hernandes* from the Universidade Estadual Paulista sent me the file for a poster that I immediately printed on high-gloss paper and proudly affixed to the door of my office. The poster depicts some of the feather mites that Fabio has found on birds from Brazil and a few other tropical countries. Eye candy for acarologists! They are all scaled to the mm mark at bottom right, where you can see the gigantic Laminalloptes phaetontis (Fabricius) from tropicbirds. Among the selected mites are the hoatzin-dwelling Opisthocomacarus umbellifer (Trouessart) (mite #40) in which both sexes are adorned with feather-like setae of unknown function. Typically, though, male feather mites are more elaborate than females. The poster includes species whose males have vicious-looking hind legs (e.g., 1, 28), or are asymmetrical (e.g., 31, 32, 58), or are very well-endowed (20).
Fabio is doing some marvelous work on taxonomy and ecology of these mites, including the very recent discovery of a host-switch from wild cuckoos to domestic poultry. But even though he and his colleague Michel Valim have been working hard to describe new species, at least 80% of bird species in Brazil have yet to be investigated for their acarofauna. Many more wonders await.
Click on the poster image then mouse over and click to magnify.
*abakashi@gmail.com
The Inquisitive Anystid 
Wow, an interesting chart! And what’s with the asymmetry of 31 and 32? That’s not the left -wing/right-wing differences you were looking for, is it?
Hi Adrian – glad you like the mites! The asymmetrical guys I was looking at belong to the genus Michaelia, a species of which is shown in images 55-57. In addition to left-right asymmetry, Michaelia males have homeomorphic (56) and heteromorphic (55) states, so with all possible combinations there’s a total of four male morphs.