Biodiversity Blog

Thursday, 28 October 2021

All things creepy: parasitism, pt 5, crypt keepers

The crypt keeper (Photo from paper by Scott P. Egan, Kelly L. Weinersmith, Sean Liu, Ryan D. Ridenbaugh, Y. Miles Zhang, Andrew A. Forbes. Creative Commons.) Talk about a nightmare of a roommate. Imagine yourself to be a larvae of gall wasp, the species Bassettia pallida more specifically. You are inside the gall of an oak tree, a gall that...

Wednesday, 20 October 2021

All things creepy: parasitism pt 1, mermithids and earwigs

This is a mermithid found in an Asian Hornet. (Wikicommons photo: PeerJ, 2015) In the spirit of Halloween and all that is spooky, we are doing a series of short blogs on parasitism! In biology, parasitism at its most basic level is where one species benefits at the expense of its host. The parasite does not always kill its host, but when it does...