Blogs from the Natural History Museum
Inspiring a love of the natural world
We have now finished digitising the Museum’s main parasitic louse slide collection – consisting of ~73,000 slides. We are sharing these openly with the global scientific community on the Museum’s Data Portal. Continue reading “Lice taking over the land and the ocean | Digital Collections Programme”
We are in the process of digitising the Museum’s parasitic louse (Phthiraptera) collection, which consists of around 73,000 microscope slides. The collection is one of the largest – and the most taxonomically comprehensive – in the world.
Lice are permanent ectoparasites, meaning they live on the outside of their bird and mammal hosts. They are highly host specific, with the majority of the ~5,000 louse species being unique to a particular host species of mammals and birds.