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Source: Tadpole staves
Author: A bowl of chopsticks
When it comes to causing panic in humans, I am afraid that few organisms can be as successful as parasites, parasitizing roundworms in the digestive tract, liver flukes that invade the liver, and plasmodiums that kill invisible people...
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A 3-year-old boy's intestines are blocked by worms, image source wikipedia
Even the movies are very keen to borrow the horror image of the parasite, such as the venom in the Marvel movies, the face-hugging worm in "Alien", the mutant clematis in "Clematis Invasion"...
Face-hugging worm in the movie Alien
But you may not think that these parasites that survive by sucking the blood and flesh of their hosts may also become weak and helpless hosts in the eyes of other parasites...
What is reparsitation
It's a "mantis cicada catcher, yellow finches are behind" story, and hyperparasitism occurs when one parasite is parasitized by another. Sometimes, this parasitic relationship can even develop into triple parasitism and quadruple parasitism.
For example, the larvae of the Pieris rapae are parasitized by the Cotesia glomerata, which in turn is parasitic by the small folded lip bee (Lysibia nana), the parsite butterfly velvet cocoon bee and the small folded lip bee, respectively.
Small folded lip bee, image source wikipedia
Typical reparatic organisms are mainly present in insect orders , especially the suborder Slender-waisted suborder distributed in hymenoptera , as well as diptera and Coleoptera , and the 17 families of Hymenoptera and a few species in Diptera and Coleoptera are known to be reparastics.
There is also a strange repararasitism relationship in the plant kingdom, and there is a class of plants, called repararasitism, which is a species under the genus Phacellaria in the family Sandalwood.
Such plants generally parasitize on the branches of mulberry parasitism, mistletoe and other plants, while mulberry parasitism, mistletoe and other plants are semi-parasitic on the branches of woody trees.
Reparaging plants tend to be stemless and leafless, and grow in clusters on host plants.
Some sort of reparation, image credit phytoimages
The essence of the world is matryoshka dolls?
The above is still a relatively simple parasitic relationship, there are many more parasitic parasites in nature, a typical example is a microbiology laboratory found a 5-fold parasitic relationship.
In this case, the parasitic relationship begins with a chick, the larvae of the fly parasitize the chick's abdomen and live by sucking blood, the larvae are parasitized by a heavy parasitic bee, and the heavy parasitic bee carries a bacterium - Wolbachia (one of the most widely distributed symbiotic bacteria in the world), and Wolbachia itself is invaded by bacteriophages (they self-replicate in the bacteria), and the parasitic relationship has reached as many as 5 levels, which is simply a nesting doll!
However, the parasitic relationship may not have ended, and the smallest parasite may be a transposon, which is no longer a biological thing, but a special class of gene fragments that can be copied individually and insert the copied fragments into different sites in the sequence of other genes, like parasites parasitizing genes, and transposons can interfere with the normal function of genes, much like parasite damage to the host.
Mutual restraint in repararasitic relationships
It has been suggested that the relationship between reparation and the relationship between grasses, herbivores, and carnivores are somewhat similar and can be mutually restrictive.
Examples of such mutual restraint do exist, such as a fungus called Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, which parasitizes the Camponotus leonardi.
Ant infected with eccentric cordyceps, image source wikipedia
Moreover, the partial snake cordyceps will change the behavior pattern of the ants, so that the ants leave the original feeding path and residence, and run to the area where the temperature and humidity are suitable for fungal growth, and then, these ants will bite the leaf veins tightly until death, in this process, the partial snake cordyceps will grow fruiting bodies from the ant head and release spores, completing the reproductive process.
However, Ley's humpback ants are not just sitting still, they have learned to "treat bacteria with bacteria". Off-side cordyceps is parasitic by another fungus that destroys off off-side cordyceps.
Therefore, the ants comb each other's hair and let the fungus spread in the colony, thereby limiting the destructive power of the partial snake cordyceps to the colony, so that the relationship between the three reaches a relatively balanced state.
Reparsalization can also cure diseases
Perhaps inspired by this, some people began to study the application value of reparasites in pest control and medical fields.
For example, Cryphonectria parasitica is a fungus that can cause severe damage to the American chestnut tree (chestnut blight is also one of the most important forest diseases), but there is a virus (low-virulence virus CHV1) that can spread between chestnut blight bacteria, causing the chestnut blight to become female sterile.
By artificially releasing chestnut blight bacteria infected with the low-virulence virus CHV1, the destructive power of chestnut blight bacteria can be effectively alleviated, and this biological control method has achieved certain results.
Chestnut blight infection causes the bark to crack, image credit wikipedia
As for medical treatment, many bacteriophages can control the proliferation of bacteria, and if they can be used to treat diseases, they are much more effective than antibiotics. At present, many researchers use phage therapy as a way of thinking to fight superbugs, and maybe one day we will be able to use phage "drugs".
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Ran Hao
Well-known popular science writer