Head Lice Podcast: ExtrasImagesSee images of Dr. Pollack at work in his former office at the Harvard School of Public Health in Ari’s NPR story from 2011. View a slideshow of Head Lice Images from EOL. FactsLice are in the order Phthiraptera, which contains some 5,000 species in four suborders. The female louse attaches eggs, known as nits, to the shaft of human hair using a cement-like substance from her reproductive organ. A louse cannot live by blood alone; most blood-sucking lice depend on symbiotic bacteria in their guts to provide vital nutrients. The human pubic or crab louse is more closely related to the lice that live on gorillas than they are to the lice that colonize our own heads. Completely unrelated to the lice that parasitize birds and mammals are the invertebrates known as Psocoptera, the barklice and booklice. Some feed on bark and lichen on trees; others are “bookworms,” pests of libraries large and small. Explore:View the Parasites of Humans collection on EOL. ParticipateDo you have a lousy specimen you’d like Dr. Pollack to identify? Snap a photo and submit it to his new company for identification, or share it via the EOL Flickr Group. |