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Wild hitchhikers

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  Wild hitchhikers Wild hitchhikers, is the name I have given to a group of organisms that hitchhike on other organisms to serve themselves. These group of organisms are called parasites. Technically speaking, parasites are helminths (flatworms), arthropods (insects), and protists. Broadly speaking, you can include pathogens (bacteria, viruses), and parasitoids (organisms that kill their hosts, e.g. wasps) as well. A major distinction between parasites and other disease causing agents is that Parasites don't usually kill their hosts, but do harm them in some ways (e.g. make them weaker compared to their counterparts). The natural world is swamped with these hitchhikers. Isn’t that scary! While it’s not exactly clear how many parasite species there are in total, some believe that upto 40% of all species could be parasitic. What is clear though that parasitic life style is adopted by creatures in over 15 phyla and over 4 of the 7 kingdoms of life. These include kingdoms plantae, anim
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Body snatchers

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  Parasitic plastic surgeons: Body snatchers Barnacle sacculina The barnacle parasitises its host, a crab, and attaches itself to the crab's body till death does them apart. This master plastic surgeon is what's called a body snatching parasite. See the parasite attached to the crab below:   Hans Hillewaert, 2005   The parasitic barnacle is similar to another body snatching parasite, a toungue-eating louse, Cymothoa exigua. The parasite attaches itself to the fish's mouth and becomes it's new tongue. Marco Vinci, 2013
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Mind controlling, host-zombiefying parasites

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Mind manipulation by parasites   Fungus Cordyceps  The caterpillar fungus, as it's commonly known in its native land, is a parasitic fungus. It's perhaps the most expensive parasite sold at a hefty sum due to its medicinal and culinary value. The parasite is also as evil as can be - turning its host into a zombie - manipulates its activities like a puppeteer manipulates a puppet. A graveyard of parasitised zombie ants is a common site where this fungus originates.     Deutsche Gesellschaft für Myklogie, 2000    Caterpillar fungus store A shop that stocks and sells this fungus. The fungus fuels the economy of the nearby villages in the Himalayas, where it's found. In the collecting season, almost every able bodied person in these villages has a single goal - to harvest this parasite - and why not, when the parasite is selling like hotcakes! Very expensive hot cakes!!                                                                              Erik Tomer, 2011  
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Hypnotists

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Brood parasitism Is where a parasite uses its host to raise its young - a little bit like the lazy Mayzie bird in Dr Suse's book, 'Horton hatches the egg', except, more sinister. Usually, trickery, mimicry and predation of the host's own eggs is involved. Cuckoo catfish While the cuckoo catfish doesn't use mimicry to trick the foster mother, a mouth-breeding cichlid fish, into picking up and adopting the catfish eggs, it is just as sinister as the cuckoo's chick who destroys the host's eggs. The catfish young hatches before the cichlid's and quickly gobbles up  its foster mother's own eggs.  The parasitic fish exploit the hosts to avoid predation inside their hosts mouth.     Public domain     The weird cichlid and catfish relationship is captured in this hair-rising video, by NZ Geo : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnvbVIcZZHc     Spider wasp   Female Golden Hunting Wasp dragging paralysed spider to its nest. The wasp hypnotises the spider to bui
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The wise Red Queen in 'Through the looking glass'

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The wise Red Queen in (Alice), Through the looking glass " Now, here , you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place"  The hypothesis was named after the famous or infamous "Red queen" because put simply it states that one must keep running (i.e., evolving) to keep existing or face extinction.      Brood parasites   Trickery is not just a characteristic, but a way of life when it comes to this parasitic bird. A European cuckoo, that tricks a starling into raising its young, is a master trickster! A starling foster parent,  hypnotized into feeding a chick twice its size, like its own, sounds like something out of science fiction.  The Alcon blue butterfly pupa uses chemical mimicry to manipulate the hardworking colony of red ants to feed it, more so than the ants' own larvae.    Tartally A, Koschuh A, Varga Z 2014 Wikipedia Co-evolutionary arm's race While the butterfly have wiped out some of their host species, some hosts are le
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