Hypnotists

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 build a state of the art web for the wasp. It also paralyses it and lays its eggs inside the spider and devours the spider's own eggs.
 
Tony Willis, Feb 2017
 


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