2023-07-21 15:43:12
Scary creatures are not only found in films. There are also creatures on earth that seem to have found their way out of our nightmares straight into reality. Now scientists have one Wurm discovered, which can not only affect other animals, but also represents a biological puzzle.
Worm of Horror fascinates researchers
According to a new Study a peculiarity has been discovered in a certain worm strain. The stringworms are parasitic in their lives: they can, for example, invade a grasshopper’s brain and eat its victim from the inside, but only to the extent that the body itself remains intact.
They can then tap into the host animal’s nervous system and steer the body toward the water, where the individual worm emerges and reproduces. So this is not dissimilar to the Cordyceps fungus in that it can also control infested creatures.
Also exciting: Recently, a video of an insect with a stinger made the rounds on the Internet. We say what’s behind the “creature from hell”.
Uncommon: Missing hairs at the cellular level in string worm
On a cellular level, stringworms lack tiny threads and hairs that are actually found in the cells of all living things and allow them to move, sense things, or filter liquids. These hairs are also called cilia and can also be found on almost all human cells.
Stringworms lack these cilia. And as the research team found, they also lack all of the genes needed to make them. Even some distant relatives of string worms get by with “only” 30 percent fewer of these genes – the complete absence is extremely strange. Even the worm sperm does not have a tail-like shape like in other living beings.
Evolutionary reasons are suspected
That parasites lack things that are normal elsewhere is not in itself new. Many rely on their hosts’ bodies to perform various functions, eliminating the need for those functions themselves. These might therefore disappear over the many years. However, there are also many parasites that do not lack the genes for cilia formation – which makes the case of stringworms all the more mysterious.
The researchers can currently only speculate that the genes in the worm were lost in early evolution and that subsequent generations simply continued in the same way. It is hoped, however, that the new study will help others with further investigations into the genetic mechanisms involved in parasitism.
Quelle: „Rampant loss of universal metazoan genes revealed by a chromosome-level genome assembly of the parasitic Nematomorpha“ (Current Biology 2023)
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