Ant berries are yummy

The parasite - oh, noble class of beast. They continue to amaze me with their creative and disgusting life history patterns. One of my favorites is a species of liver fluke, called the Lancet fluke (or Dicrocoelium dendriticum) whose ultimate host is a sheep or other grazing animal, but it has to go through some of the juvenile stages inside a snail (see more info here).

It goes a little something like this: sheep has parasite in its liver and constsantly poops out fluke eggs. Snails eats eggy poop and the larvae hatch and reproduce inside the snail. Snail poops (well really extrudes) out the cysts in a “slime ball”, that slime ball is collected and eaten by ants, who like the juicy moisture. And here is the absolute BEST part. Once inside the ant, the fluke MANIPUTLATES THE ANT’S TINY BRAIN and makes it climb up to the tip top of grass blades where it is more likely to be eaten by a sheep (or other grazing animal) where the adult liver fluke lives happily producing eggs for the poop. I mean how cool is that? MIND CONTROL, people.

Anyways. Some researchers at Berkeley have found out that when a different kind of ant Cephalotes atratus gets infected with a type of nematode (round worm), the ant’s abdomen grows big, fat, round and red, resembling a berry. So birds will come along and eat the tasty looking berry ant, thereby spreading around the worm through their poop.

Note: while it might seem like parasites ALWAYS involved poop, this is simply not true. Parasitoids (the inspriation for the move Alien) such as parasitoid wasps often inject their eggs directly into the host. Once fully grown, the adult then bursts out of the host (often a caterpillar), exploding and killing it, but with no poop whatsoever.