Threadlike worms living in the guts of certain insects make their hosts jump into water and drown
. What scientists knew about these parasites resembling strands of spaghetti was already pretty bizarre. The larvae infest arthropods, such as crickets and beetles, and grow for several months inside their terrestrial hosts, but they must return to water to mate and lay eggs. To do that, the worms manipulate a host’s behavior, compelling it to seek water and plunge in. The parasites can then wriggle out of the host’s rear end and swim away. But the worms just got a lot weirder.
The new study presents a fresh perspective on the anomaly, “combining genome-scale molecular data and detailed morphological observation,” said biologist Keiichi Kakui, a lecturer in the department of biological sciences at Hokkaido University in Japan. Kakui, who was not involved in the new research, was the lead author for a study that identified the first known examples of marine horsehair worm juveniles in deep-sea crustaceans called isopods.
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