Parasitic Threesomes

When I first saw this article, Tricky Parasite Creates Deadly Threesome, on LiveScience, I thought it was going to be about the parasites I had seen earlier on Joshua's blogpost Hot three-way action with grass and 'shrooms. It turns out they have nothing to do with each other. I guess the word threesome just has too much sex appeal to resist using in the title (not that I'm guilty of that).

Joshua's post is on a paper that appeared in Science about plants near the hotsprings in Yellowstone that become resistant to heat if they're infected with a specific parasitic fungus which itself must also be infected by a specific virus in order for the heat resistance to be established (Wow!).

The LiveScience article is about a parasitic worm that swaps hosts between a shrimp-like crustacean (amphipod) and a predatory fish. Like other parasites, upon maturing this worm (Pomphorhynchus laevis) causes its host (the amphipod) to change its behavior and actually seek out its predators.

Check out the hooks the worm uses to latch onto its host. Ewww!