https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bT774hw8YxU

Amber snails are taken over by flatworms. These flatworms inhabit the snails’ eye stalks, pulsating in order to resemble larvae. They also affect the snails’ motion, driving the snails into open well-lit areas early in the morning. This attracts birds, hungry for larvae, and the birds eat the snails. The flatworms pass through the bird’s digestive system and get shat out alive, only to be eaten by snails, and so the circle of life continues.

Attenborough/Planet Earth

Cordyceps: attack of the killer fungi

⚠ selectively quoted article extracts may create misleading impression

https://entomologytoday.org/2020/03/19/when-a-mosquito-cant-stop-drinking-blood-the-result-isnt-pretty/

An urban legend says that if you tense your muscle when a mosquito bites you and feeds on your blood, it can swell up and explode.

The first ever exploding mosquitoes can be attributed to Robert Gwadz, Ph.D., in a discovery that was made through basic laboratory research over 50 years ago.

I attempted to replicate these findings using a simple procedure.

Female Aedes aegypti mosquitoes (only females feed on blood) were immobilized by placing them in the fridge for an hour.

The next day, I let the mosquitoes feed on my arm, as we do routinely in our laboratory. And then the magic happened.

Mosquitoes drank far beyond their fair share of blood and were rendered unable to fly or even walk. Others went even further, drinking so much that they eventually burst.

Although the results are dramatic, performing surgery on individual mosquitoes is not a practical way to control mosquito populations or reduce the incidence of mosquito-borne diseases.

Perran Ross, Ph.D., is a postdoctoral research fellow in the School of BioSciences at the University of Melbourne, Australia.