A Statistical Test for Host–Parasite Coevolution

A new method, ParaFit, has been developed to test the significance of a global hypothesis of coevolution between parasites and their hosts. Individual host-parasite association links can also be tested. The test statistics are functions of the host and parasite phylogenetic trees and of the set of host–parasite association links. Numerical simulations are used to show that the method has correct rate of type I error and good power except under extreme error conditions. An application to real data (pocket gophers and chewing lice) is presented.