CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

This chapter deals with a part of the chewing lice in the suborder Amblycera, found or possible to be found in Argentina. It includes a breaf characterization of the suborder and the seven families, all them with Argentinean representatives. A total of 319 species in 50 genera are cited, giving a checklist of these species and their respective avian or mammalian hosts known to date. Of these, only one has been described from a single specimen, three from four or five specimens, and the remaining from over six. The importance of the knowledge and systematic descriptions of eggs and nymphal instars for their identification, as well as their comparative studies are emphasyzed, pointing out that the species recognition based on the external chorionic morphology of the eggs together with the host association becomes important when museum study skins of locally extinct o rarely collected hosts or from inaccessible areas are the main source of lice for faunistic studies. Comments are given on their sanitary importance as vectors of microorganisms, including filarioidean worms, responsible of severe deseases in birds and mammals, along with considerations of the role as stress-causing agents in caged hosts, and the economical losses they may cause in husbandry and domesticated birds and mammals. An analysis of the diversity of the Amblycera on the different bird and mammalian orders reresented in Argentina led to the conclusion that the most significant number of species to be discovered would found within the Passeriformes (some 55l species and subspecies in the country, only 17,2% of them with one or more Amblyceran species), Piciformes in the families Picidae and Ramphastidae (47 species, 19,1% with one or more lice known) and Falconiformes (72 species, 29,2% of them with lice) within birds, and the Octodontoid rodents (50 species, 40% with one to four species of lice) within mammals.

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