They prove that our world is just incredible.
Because of the tree-parasite, the telephone company began to make special cables under the ground? Is it true that some cancers have learned to actually castrate their hosts? And what a woodlouse adapted to be instead of the language.
A parasite composed of one cell
Evolution sometimes does not complicate, but simplifies things. An example of oversimplification can be considered unicellular parasites Myxozoa, which are distant relatives of jellyfish. Their relationship was suspected because of the similarity of the polar capsules Myxozoa from flowing down the cells of coelenterates and proved by DNA analysis. During specialization, the genome of these parasites has decreased more than 95% of it is gone including the genes responsible for the formation of multicellular individuals. The Myxozoa parasites as hosts choose fish or oligochaetes.
Ticks and hedgehogs
In nature researchers sometimes find hedgehogs, “armed” with cigarette butts. Definitive explanation of “love” hedgehogs for butts yet, but most biologists are inclined to believe that the Bruins use them as a repellent against ticks. Specialists-Parasitologists also began to use hedgehogs for quantifying ticks in natural foci of encephalitis and introduced a bit of a strange unit of account “every hour”, which means the number of ticks collected hedgehog for yourself for a one hour run in the woods.
Ant medicine
If the ants realize that their relatives were infected by spores of the fungus parasite, they do not isolate the poor fellow, and carried out the procedure of vaccination of the inhabitants of ant nests. Infected ant passes healthy a small number of spores, which is not enough for full infection, but stimulates the activity of the immune system.
Tricky barnacles cancer
Marine arthropod parasite sacculina almost does not have its own organs and limbs. It is embedded in the body cancer or the crab, criss-crossing his internal organs are root outgrowths, and another part of the parasite comes out in the form of a pouch. It hatched eggs of sacculina, with crab-the owner takes care of them as their own, losing any opportunity to further reproduction. The parasite changes the behavior of crabs and males, arranging them to chemical castration, after which they take care of the bag with the eggs of sacculina just like females.
Parasites, generating real monsters
Parasitic flatworms of the genus Ribeiroia begins its life inside a snail path, where you develop to the second stage, leaving the body and try to choose as the victim a frog or a fish. Embedded in tadpoles, the parasite produces specific substances that influence the growth of limbs, causing adult amphibians grow up with a set of extra limbs. This reduces their speed and endurance, making it more easy prey for the final host of the parasite — a bird or a mammal. In their gut Ribeiroia produces eggs, which along with droppings can be again eaten by the snail.
Trees-parasites, learned to cut telephone cables
Nuytsia profusely grown in Western Australia, almost does not have its root system, and lead polyparasitism lifestyle, attaching their processes haustoria to the roots of other plants, and thus water and nutrients. Tenacity shoots of this tree is so high that more than once there were cases cutting them underground telephone cables. This tree has forced the Australian telephone company to lay cable in places of growth of nuytsia more protected wires.
The parasite, which replaces a on
The parasite Cymothoa exigua, or “centipede, devouring language” is the only known parasite that replaces an organ of the host. Chickweed penetrates through the gills into the body of the spotted rose snapper, and then sucks blood from the tongue of the fish and after it complete atrophy itself takes the function of language. Along the way a parasite feeds on blood and mucus of the host, but doesn’t starve the host to death.
“Lethal rider”
Insect Hymenoepimecis argyraphaga parasitizes on spiders ” Plesiometa argyra. The female of this insect temporarily paralyzes the spider and lays an egg on the abdomen of the spider. The emerging larva feeds on the juices of the spider, who at this time continues to weave a plain web. But after 14 days before pupation the larvae of the rider-parasite she admits in the victim’s body, special chemicals that change the behavior of the spider, who begins to build a thicker web. Becoming a pupa, the rider kills the spider with poison and forms a cocoon to hold of which on the weight and required reinforced threads.
