Haemoproteus insects including mosquitoes, biting midges ("Culicoides"), louse flies ("Hippoboscidae") and tabanid flies ("Tabanidae"). Infection with this genus is sometimes known as pseudomalaria because of the parasites' similarities with "Plasmodium" species. Within the genus there are at least 173 species, 5 varieties and 1 subspecies. Of these over 140 occur in birds, 16 in reptiles and 3 in amphibia: 14 orders and 50 families of birds are represented. These include gamebirds ("Galliformes"), waterfowl ("Anseriformes"), raptors ("Accipitriformes", "Falconiformes", "Strigiformes"), pigeons and doves ("Columbiformes"), and perching birds or songbirds ("Passeriformes"). The first description of this genus was in 1890 by Kruse who described
Genomic evolution of birds possibility of genomic expansion in mammals and reptiles. Also, there is no such genomic loss in any vertebrate group as great as that of birds. Its possible that the early chromosomic fragmentation event that lead to the appearance of microchromosomes in birds significantly contributed to this gene loss. These fragmentation events must have taken place in a common ancestor of most birds, since approximately every two out of three species studied have at least 30 pairs of microchromosomes, 2n = 80 being the size of the average karyotype of birds (with the only exception the family Falconidae, which are 2n