Proceedings of 

 the United States 

 National Museum 



SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION • WASHINGTON, D.C. 



Volume 112 I960 Number 3438 



STUDIES IN NEOTROPICAL MALLOPHAGA, XVII: A NEW 



FAMILY (TROCHILIP1IAGIDAE) AND A NEW GENUS 



OF THE LICE OF HUMMINGBIRDS 



By M. A. Carriker, Jr. 



I wish to express my thanks to Dr. J. F. Gates Clarke and other 

 members of the Division of Entomology of the U.S. National Museum 

 for having reviewed a preliminary draft of parts of the present paper. 

 My thanks are also due to Colonel K. C. Emerson for the loan of 

 material and other assistance. All measurements are in millimeters. 

 I drew all illustrations accurately to scale by means of an eye-piece 

 micrometer with a No. 10 eye piece, Nos. 16 and 4 objectives. 



On the basis of the nomenclature now currently applied to the 

 Mallophaga of the Trochilidae, two genera of the suborder Amblycera 

 are normally but not abundantly found on the Trochilidae: Tro- 

 chiloecetes and Ricinus. The former are known only from the Tro- 

 chilidae, but the latter are common parasites of many species of passer- 

 ine birds. Any other genus of Mallophaga which may have been 

 recorded from the hummingbirds are patently stragglers and should 

 be disregarded. 



The genus Trochiloecetes is the more abundant of the two. I 

 have specimens of it from 32 species of hosts ranging from Mexico 

 to Bolivia, whereas I have taken Ricinus-\ike forms from only 20 

 species of hosts. Only 4 species of hummingbirds have yielded both 

 genera of lice, and only once have both genera been taken on the 



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