The praying mantis is normally the predator—quiet, centered, and lethal. However even this insect isn’t secure from a weird twist of nature: a parasite referred to as the horsehair worm. It’s an odd little creature that may truly take management of the mantis’s thoughts.
Horsehair worms begin in water, the place their eggs hatch into tiny larvae. Small bugs, like crickets or beetles, eat these larvae. Then, a mantis comes alongside and eats these bugs—and that’s when the worm’s plan kicks in.
Contained in the mantis, the worm grows, generally getting extremely lengthy—nearly a metre in size! However right here’s the scary half: as soon as it’s prepared to return out, the worm by some means convinces the mantis to leap into water. Since mantises don’t normally go close to water — that is completely out of character. However it’s precisely what the worm wants to flee and return to water, the place it will probably lay its eggs and begin the cycle over again.
How the worm hijacks the mantis
Scientists just lately found out how this thoughts management would possibly work. The horsehair worm appears to have stolen a few of the mantis’s genes—actually. By horizontal gene switch, the worm picked up bits of mantis DNA and now makes use of that to trick the mantis’s physique into listening to it. It produces proteins that imitate the mantis’s personal, letting it ship indicators to the mind and alter its behaviour.
Horsehair worms begin their lives in water, the place their eggs hatch into tiny larvae (Supply: Wikimedia Commons)
It’s not fairly like science fiction—it’s actual science, and it’s fairly creepy.
One other unusual impact of the parasite is that contaminated mantises out of the blue begin heading in the direction of mild. That could be as a result of mild reflecting off water helps the worm information its host to a pond or stream. However generally this backfires—mantises have been discovered leaping onto shiny roads or automobile roofs, mistaking them for water. That’s how lethal the parasite’s affect could be.
This gene-stealing, brain-hacking behaviour is extraordinarily uncommon within the animal kingdom. It’s extra frequent in micro organism, however to see a worm doing it to a mantis is one thing scientists are nonetheless attempting to know totally. What’s clear is that nature has some very unusual methods of holding life going—even when it means turning a predator right into a puppet.