11 Body-Snatching Parasites

There are a lot of parasites out there. Some estimates suggest that as many as half of all the species on Earth live inside and feed off other species. A 2018 study published in the journal BMC Ecology argues that the parasitoid wasps might be the largest single group of animals—a title generally thought to be held by beetles.

Practically every species has its own set of parasites, and even parasites have parasites. In many cases, a parasite's host is little more than a habitat where it can eat and breed. But some parasites have gone a step further, evolving to manipulate their hosts in ways that give the parasite a better shot at reaching maturity and spreading its young far and wide. Their methods can be as deliciously gross as the worst imaginings of horror movie screenwriters. Here are 11 examples.

1. Jewel Wasp // Australia, Pacific Islands

The jewel wasp Ampulex compressa is iridescently beautiful, but it's a nightmare for the American cockroach. When a pregnant female wasp gets hold of a roach, she temporarily paralyzes its muscles with a sting, then threads her stinger up into the roach's brain, injecting a cocktail of chemicals that turn the roach into a zombie. The roach could move when the paralysis wears off, but now it doesn't want to. Instead, it allows the wasp to gently lead it by one antenna to her burrow, where she walls it in with one of her eggs. That egg will soon become a larva that spends its first week on Earth eating the living roach bit by bit before pupating and emerging as a wasp to continue the cycle.

2. Nematomorph Hairworm // Europe

Everything seems normal for weeks after a long-horned grasshopper has drunk water containing the microscopic larvae of the hairworm Spinochordodes tellinii, but that changes as soon as the worm grows big enough to start yearning for a mate. That's when it secretes chemicals that change its host's brain chemistry, making deep water seem enticing to the insect. The grasshopper suddenly has the urge to take a long hop off a short pier, and as it drowns, the worm—now as much as three times as long as the insect it lived in—squeezes out of its host and swims off to find a mate. Other hairworm species prefer praying mantises or spiders as hosts, but it's the same endgame for them all.

3. Parasitic Barnacle // Marine Coastlines

A female Sacculina carcini starts its life like any other barnacle—as a tiny planktonic baby floating free in the ocean. But unlike your average barnacle, when she drifts onto a crab she doesn't just settle down and become a warty bump riding on its shell. Instead, she burrows into the crab and grows until she infiltrates every crevice of the crab's body. This can take years, but eventually she's big enough to inflate her bulbous reproductive structures through the crab's abdomen so microscopic males of her species can fertilize her eggs. Once that happens, her crabby host stops molting and growing; all it does is eat and take care of its parasite. Her babies are incubated inside the crab's abdomen, and since part of her is inside the crab's brain by now, she also hijacks its egg-caring behaviors—even male crabs nurture them—to aerate and disperse thousands of her own future mind-controlling brood.

4. Ichneumoid // North America

A female ichneumoid wasp Campoletis sonorensis sneaking up on a grazing caterpillar isn't looking for a meal for herself—she's shopping for a nose-to-tail larder for her young. The wasp injects one or two fertilized eggs under the caterpillar's skin, and just for good measure, squirts in a virus that will keep the caterpillar's immune system from attacking the invaders. When she flies away, the caterpillar goes right back to eating, but it's a dead grub walking: In a few days, the wormlike wasp larvae hatch inside the caterpillar. They'll spend a couple of weeks munching away at its guts until they grow large enough to burst through its body wall. Then, they spin cocoons—often beside or on the dead body of their host—and pupate into another generation of chest-busting parasitoids (which, unlike most parasites, always kill their hosts).

5. Green-Banded Broodsac Flatworm // Europe, North America

A land snail's eyestalks are normally a pretty drab affair, but that all changes if the snail licks up bird droppings infected with larvae from the flatworm Leucochloridium paradoxum. The baby worms move into the snail's digestive gland, forming an asexual colony that can eventually make up a quarter of the snail's mass. As the colony matures, it starts packing members into bright green, squirming brood sacs that writhe up into the snail's eyestalks, swelling them into fat approximations of wriggling caterpillars. If that's not enough to grab a hungry bird's attention, those pulsing, writhing brood sacs can also break through the snail's body wall and crawl off to mimic a juicy grub on their own.

6. Phronima Amphipods // Deep Oceans Worldwide

The deep-sea amphipod genus Phronima is a literal body-snatcher. This parasitoid captures gelatinous salps—jet-propelled, filter-feeding planktonic animals that are closely related to vertebrates—and hollows them out with jaws and claws, consuming the salp's brain, gills, stomach, and muscles, and scraping its inner walls smooth. The salp body—technically still living—becomes a barrel-shaped, ocean-going home that the amphipod can maneuver like a miniature submarine. It might eventually be a full house, too—female Phronima keep their young in the barrel and care for them until they've grown.

7. Ribeiroian Trematode Flatworm // North America

The horror starts when larvae of the parasitic flatworm Ribeiroia ondatrae leave the snail they used as a nursery and burrow into the tail of a bullfrog tadpole. When the tadpole metamorphoses into an adult frog, the flatworms form cysts around its developing legs, disrupting their growth in ways that damage or double them. The flatworm-infested frog can't jump away from predatory birds like herons, which gobble them up. The flatworm then spreads to new waterways wherever the bird poops.

8. Gall Wasp // Worldwide

Not even plants are safe from parasitism. Females of Cynipidae, the family of gall wasps, lay their eggs inside leaves or under bark, and their larvae make the plant cells surrounding them grow faster than they would normally, effectively forcing the plant to grow them a house. Weird, nonleafy shapes rise up out of the plant, filled with juicy nutritious tissues that feed the wasp larvae, and surrounded by tough woody walls that protect it until it becomes an adult (more than a year in some species) and chews its way out of its safe space.

9. Entomopathogenic Fungus // North America

Goldenrod soldier beetles depend on the family of flowering plants commonly known as asters, which includes goldenrods and daisies. The beetles eat the plants' pollen and mate in their shade. But if a beetle gets infected with the fungus Eryniopsis lampyridarum, it climbs up an aster's stem, clenches the base of a flower with its mandibles, and dies. Within a day, the fungus forces the dead beetle's wings open to expose its spores, which rain down on the hapless beetles below.

10. Opecoelid Trematode Flatworm // Pacific Ocean Reefs

The tiny polyps that build stony corals are usually an inconspicuous brown. But that changes whenever a polyp inadvertently grabs a young flatworm for a meal. Somehow, the trematode worm doesn't get digested—instead, it invades the polyp's tentacles, swelling them and turning them bright pink. The color is a bright billboard advertising deliciousness to butterflyfish on the reef, who eat the flashy polyps and spread the worm to other corals across the reef.

11. Lancet Liver Fluke // North America, Europe, Asia

This crafty trematode parasitizes not one, but three hosts: snails, ants, and grass-eating herbivores (and sometimes humans). The cycle goes something like this. A mature fluke (Dicrocoelium dendriticum) lays its eggs in the liver of an herbivore, such as a cow; the cow eventually poops them out in its feces. Snails come along to nibble on the feces, licking up the baby flukes in the process, which are later expelled by the snails in the form of miniscule balls of slime. When an ant consumes a slime ball, the flukes disperse inside the ant’s body and emit chemicals that take over its brain. The parasite compels its host to climb to the top of a blade of grass at sundown to be eaten by a passing cow, thus starting the cycle anew. But if it doesn’t get eaten by morning—and here’s where nature gets really freaky—the ant climbs down the blade of grass as though everything is totally fine, spends the day acting normally, and then climbs back up the grass when the sun sets.

A version of this story ran in 2018; it has been update for 2022.