Leptopilina boulardi by Alexander Wild

In a French meadow, a creature that specialises in corrupting the bodies of other animals is getting a taste of its own medicine.

Leptopilina boulardi is a wasp that lays its eggs in fly maggots. When the wasp grub hatches, it devours its host form the inside out, eventually bursting out of its dead husk. A maggot can only support a single grub, and if two eggs end up in the same host, the grubs will compete with one another until only one survives. As such, the wasps ensure that they implant each target with just one egg. And if they find a maggot that has already been parasitized by another L.boulardi, they usually stay away.

Usually, but not always.

L.boulardi is sometimes infected by a virus called LbFV, which stands for L.boulardi filamentous virus. And just as the wasp takes over the body of its maggot target, so the virus commandeers the body of the wasp. It changes her behaviour so that she no longer cares if a maggot is already occupied. She will implant her eggs, even if her target has an existing tenant. After infected wasps are finished, a poor maggot might have up to eleven eggs inside it.

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A black bean aphid is about to have a rough day. It has been targeted by a parasitic wasp, which lays several eggs inside its body. When the eggs hatch, the wasp grubs will try to eat the aphid from the inside out. If they succeed, the aphid will die, and the young wasps will burst from its corpse to find aphids of their own.

But the aphid isn’t necessarily doomed. There’s a chance that it will resist the attempt to usurp its body. If it does, the wasps will have done it a favour. When the mother wasp implanted its eggs, it also infected the aphid with bacteria that protect against parasitic wasps. It inadvertently vaccinated the aphid against its own kind.

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Some people drink alcohol to drown their sorrows. So does the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, but its sorrows aren’t teary rejections or lost jobs. It drinks to kill wasps that have hatched inside its body, and would otherwise eat it alive. It uses alcohol as a cure for body-snatchers.

D.melanogaster lives in a boozy world. It eats yeasts that grow on rotting fruit, which can contain up to 6 per cent alcohol. Being constantly drunk isn’t a good idea for a wild animal, and the flies have evolved a certain degree of resistance to alcohol. But Neil Milan from Emory University has found that alcohol isn’t just something that the insect tolerates. It’s also fly medicine.

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“God save thee, ocean sunfish
From the fiends that plague thee thus
Why look’st thou so? With thy large shoals,
Thou fed the albatross.”

- Samuel Taylor Coleridge, sort of.

Albatrosses are superb long-distance fliers that can scour vast tracts of ocean in search of food. But sometimes, food comes to them. In July 2010, Tazuko Abe from Hokkaido University found albatrosses cleaning a school of ocean sunfish, basking at the surface of the western Pacific Ocean.

The ocean sunfish is a truly bizarre animal. It looks like someone cut the head off a much bigger fish and strapped fins to it. It’s the largest of the bony fish*. The biggest one ever found was 2.7 metres in length and weighed 2.3 tonnes. The youngsters, of course, are much smaller. The ones that Abe saw on his research cruise were just 40 centimetres long. There were at least 57 of them, each turned on its side so its broad flank faced the water surface.

The basking shoals were attending a sort of sunfish spa. The fish were infested with parasites. Pennella, a long scarlet relative of shrimp and crabs, was embedded headfirst in the flesh beneath their fins, busily sucking their blood. But not for long – black-footed and Laysan albatrosses were attracted to the shoal and picked the Pennella off their bodies. In some cases, the sunfish seems to be courting the birds, following them around and swimming sideways next to them.

Ocean sunfish live throughout the oceans but they often spend time at the surface before diving to the depths. Some scientists think that they’re absorbing heat from the sun, but it’s possible that they could also be looking for a spot of personal hygiene.

These fish can play host to at least 50 species of parasites, and they often have considerable numbers on their large bodies. Many ocean animals rely on cleaner fish or cleaner shrimp to rid them of parasites. It’s possible that albatrosses might fulfil the same role for ocean sunfish.

Of course, the association might have been a one-off. However, there are other reports of seabirds such as shearwaters and albatrosses flocking around schools of basking sunfish. This instance stands out only because Abe has photographic evidence that they were actually parasites. As he rightly points out, such events would be difficult to spot among the vastness of the open ocean.

* Fish have skeletons that are either made of cartilage, as in sharks and rays, or bone, as in all the others.

Reference: Abe, Sekiguchi, Onishi, Muramatsu & Kamito. 2011. Observations on a school of ocean sunfish and evidence for a symbiotic cleaning association with albatrosses. Marine Biology http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00227-011-1873-6

Throughout North America, honeybees are abandoning their hives. The workers are often found dead, some distance away. Meanwhile, the hives are like honeycombed Marie Celestes, with honey and pollen left uneaten, and larvae still trapped in their chambers.

There are many possible causes of this “colony collapse disorder” (CCD). These include various viruses, a single-celled parasite called Nosema apis, a dramatically named mite called Varroa destructor, exposure to pesticides, or a combination of all of the above. Any or all of these factors could explain why the bees die, but why do the workers abandon the hive?

Andrew Core from San Francisco State University has a possible answer, and a new suspect for CCD. He has shown that a parasitic fly, usually known for attacking bumblebees, also targets honeybees. The fly, Apocephalus borealis, lays up to a dozen eggs in bee workers. Its grubs eventually eat the bees from the inside-out. And the infected workers, for whatever reason, abandon their hives to die.

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A stickleback is heading for a warm bath. While its peers prefer to swim in lukewarm water at around 16 degrees Celsius, this individual likes it hotter. That’s not because of a personal preference – instead, it is being steered by a parasite. A tapeworm has lodged in its guts, and it needs warmer temperatures to grow as large as possible. The stickleback becomes little more than a living car that drives the worm to the heated pools that it prefers. (more…)

You know how it is: one minute you’re having sex and the next, your partner has been stung and paralysed, and you’re being dragged off to a burrow by your genitals only to be buried and eaten alive.

Such is the life of the Australian plague locust, a common pest that is targeted by the black digger wasp. The wasp is a parasite that creates living larders for her grubs. She stocks them with the bodies of paralysed insects. Last December, the locusts formed dense plagues in southeastern Australia just as the wasps were starting to collect fresh meat for their young. And Darrell Kemp from Macquarie University was watching as the two species collided.

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Some parents give their children a head start in life by lavishing them with money or opportunities. The mother seed beetle (Mimosestes amicus) does so by providing her children with shields to defend them from body-snatchers.

A female seed beetle abandons her eggs after laying them. Until they hatch, they are vulnerable to body-snatching parasites, like the wasp Uscana semifumipennis. It specialises on seed beetle eggs and lays its own eggs inside. Once the wasp grub hatches, it devours its host. The wasp problem is so severe that around 70 percent of the beetles’ eggs can be infested.

But the mother seed beetles have a defence, and it is a unique one. Joseph Deas and Molly Hunter from the University of Arizona have found that they can protect an egg from this grisly fate by laying another one on top. Sometimes, the mothers lay entire stacks of two or three eggs. The tops ones are always flat and unviable. They never hatch into grubs and they completely cover the ones underneath.

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It is dawn in a European forest, and gypsy moth caterpillars are looking for somewhere to hide. With early birds starting to rise, the caterpillars will spend the day in bark crevices or buried in soil. But one of them is behaving very strangely. While its peers head downwards, this one climbs upwards, to the very top of the highest leaves. It has come to die.

At the top of its plant, the caterpillar liquefies. Its body almost seems to melt. As it does, it releases millions of viruses, dripping them onto plants below and releasing them into the air. These viruses are the agents that compelled the caterpillar to climb, and eventually killed it. They are baculoviruses, and they cause a condition known aptly as Wipfelkrankheit – the German for “tree top disease”.

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Around a third of us are infected with a brain parasite called Toxoplasma gondii. This single-celled creature spreads to humans from cats, and has a tendency to change the behaviour of its hosts. Now, a team of scientists led by Frederic Thomas and Kevin Lafferty have found that countries where more people are infected with the parasite have higher rates of brain cancer.

This does not mean that T.gondii causes brain cancer, or even that the two are actually linked. Patricia McKinney, who studies brain cancer and was not involved in the study, says, “This is a technically sound hypothesis-generating paper and, viewed as such, is interesting. It doesn’t tell us much, other than pointing towards some further investigation.”

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